This autumn we started the project “Critical Escape”, a Transnational Youth Initiative with the aim of creating educational escape rooms for young people. We are running this project with our Swedish partner organisation Awesome People.
Escape rooms are becoming more popular every year all over the world. We decided to combine this trend with an educational aspect. We are building two escape rooms in each country and engaging local youth in the process of developing them. The aim is to empower young people from various backgrounds to develop critical thinking and raise the level of their involvement in the community life through participating in this project.
The challenge of this project is to build educational and portable quests and travel with them around the country starting in May.
October 2018 was full of events. We had an introduction event in Estonia for possible future escape room designers. We informed the attendants about project objectives, timeline and about the differences between formal and non-formal education. The second part of the event was an introduction to the topic of critical thinking. We discussed the definition of critical thinking and skills connected with it. After that participants got to try examples of outside-box exercises which they tried to solve in groups.
We also held a four-day kick-off event together with the Swedish team from Awesome People. We had sessions and workshops about the content of escape rooms, reporting, communication tools and the project action plan. We divided roles for team members and did some team-building. We also introduced our friends to the lovely Tallinn old town and did market research by visiting two escape rooms.
Currently in Estonia we have 4 members of a support team with different backgrounds who are facilitating workshops and meetings with escape rooms’ specialists.
Our creative team consists of 9 enthusiasts who are ready to go through the process of creating escape rooms from scratch. In November two members of our support team participated in the training course ‘’Escape Radicalization’’, which concentrated on building educational escape rooms on the topic of radicalization. This project was a great experience in seeing the process of escape room creation. We also met with a specialist from Georgia, who shared her own experience with building and running an escape room.
We also visited two escape rooms in November with our escape room creators. Afterwards, we had working sessions with the escape room owners, who told us about the creation process and story development. After these experiences our support team is feeling pretty confident about the future. For December we have scheduled a problem-brainstorming workshop with a social worker and another workshop right before Christmas, where we will finalize the stories of our escape rooms-to-be. Next year will see us building, testing and running the rooms. This you will hear about more soon!
Maria Kurm
Cooordinator of Critical Escape
