Interview in Signum

Group working at the Finnish workshop...

Way back in March, I ran an educational escape room workshop in Helsinki. As a follow up, Eerika Kiuru & Janika Asplund interviewed me, which they wrote up for a journal called Signum. This has just been published (open access). 

So if anyone wants to read my thoughts as I chunter away about escape rooms, play, innovation, and information literacy, the interview is online now... https://doi.org/10.25033/sig.65499  

Helsinki escape room workshop and feedback

I ran a workshop in Helsinki earlier this week - a full day of creating educational escape rooms with a lovely bunch of Finnish librarians.

All the groups created prototype escape rooms during the day, I was really impressed with the variety of things they created and the ideas they came up with.

Next version of this will be an open workshop I'm running in Huddersfield on 13th April, bookings are via Eventbrite for anyone who wants to come along.

The quick (post-it at end of session type) feedback from the Helsinki event is below:

• This was an awesome day! Thank You!
• Really enjoyed today's session, it was thought-provoking and engaging. Thanks.
• Thank you for the workshop. I got lots of good tips and will definitely use this method.
• I learned about escape rooms!
• I'm happy with this workshop, plus I had a lot of fun! I liked the balance of hearing / listening and creating by ourselves. Andrew was very helpful whenever we got stuck with our plans. Altogether I feel I have some new ideas and methods to bring back home.
• I liked how I had to think in totally new ways!
• An interesting (and exciting) workshop! I'm not sure if I can use this in my teaching. Thanks!
• Thank you for an inspiring day! :-)
• Thank you! Great day and collaboration. I got new point of view to training. This helps me with my Masters in Library Sciences.

Finland workshop

I've a few workshops booked in over the coming months, plus more are in the planning stages. One I'm particularly excited about is in Helsinki at the main University Library! It's been arranged through the STKS (Finnish Research Library Association).
I'll be running a workshop around creating escape room materials for libraries - using the workbook I've created as a template / scaffold for the day.
I won't have much of a chance to have a nosey around, but still excited about spending 24 hours in Finland!

The day after I'm going to Tallinn, Estonia (a short-ish ferry ride away), finishing off setting stuff up to run all the training, etc., that I do through an Estonian company as an e-resident, which I'm hoping will be much easier admin wise than in the UK.