The transnational youth initiative has been running for 9 months now. In this time we have created two and a half escape rooms, game-mastered around 20 escape games and visited several youth centers, as well as participated in the Tallinn Old Town Days. And the project is not nearly over; we are at a place now where we have tested the games enough to know what works and what doesn’t; what needs to be improved and what is the potential impact of this tool of non-formal learning.
Here are some highlights in the development of the rooms so far:
Testing the rooms for the first time
This took place in the end of April in Tudengimaja. We ran both rooms that were created by our two teams of creators and got a lot of interesting feedback and points that needed to be developed further. Our rooms were played by Shokkin members, who are mega-enthusiasts and therefore have a lot of experience with escape rooms.
Midterm meeting in Sweden
We visited our friends and partners from Awesome People in Örebrö. Aside from the lovely warm atmosphere and great food, it was also a chance to see what the Swedish team had created in this time (two cool escape games) and to run the rooms that we created for them to play. The feedback was very useful for both teams. We also visited an amazing escape-room-quest-game-house Bodaborg, which had around 100 rooms to play/escape from/complete. While our rooms are more focused on an educational aspect, it was super fun and very inspiring also for future ideas.
Old Town Days
The month of May ended and June began with the Tallinn Old Town days, where Shokkin Group hosted an escape room in the amazing Bremeni tower. In this 600-year old setting we run the Communication-themed room for many teams. It was a great learning experience – both in game-mastering, organising and further room development also.
More tests!
In June we are visiting Voka Avatud Noortekeskus and Tapa Õpilasmalev and running our portable educational escape rooms there. We are planning more visits to schools and youth centres again from September onwards.