Our project Critical Escape has been underway now for many months, so let us introduce the rooms that we have created!
When we started to brainstorm the topics, we mapped the most common social problems among the youth in Estonia. We involved social workers and youth workers, as well as active members of the community to share their stories. While there were many important topics surfacing, the ones we chose in the end were drug use among young people and a passive attitude to life.
The topic of drugs kind of speaks for itself, but it is still worth mentioning that Estonia has the most drug-related deaths of young people for many years now; we decided to emphasize once again how much damage this habit can do to a young body. As well as informing young people about the short and long-term effects of recreational drug use, we aimed to approach the subject in a straight-forward manner. Rather than lecturing the target group, we took up the task of informing them as objectively as possible, to empower young people to make their own conscious choices and to ensure that no accidents or incidences happen that are the consequences of making poorly informed choices. This is one of the rooms, suitable for age 15+.
The other topic that we chose to work with is something more subtle, yet prevalent in our society – the topic of passive attitude towards life. This is surely something that every youth worker has encountered. We approached this topic first by focusing on environmental problems but quickly realized that this is just one side of the coin and that the problem actually lies deeper. It’s not that we do not care about the environment; the problem is that we feel like one person cannot change anything and this applies to all paths of life – be it politics, social innovation, a change in business practices, climate change or anything else. It is always easier to sit back and complain, but that is not how change gets made. With this idea in mind, we created a dystopian scenario, where this problem has been taken to the extreme. No spoilers; I will just say that we value communication and action-taking highly and hope to inspire young people around us to actively create the changes that they want to see in the world.
The format of educational escape games is relatively new, but has shown already to have a vast potential; many issues can be approached through a first-hand experience. The games have a strong impact on the players and the experience is very immersive. This is an ideal tool to combine with formal education, to enhance the learning experience of any topic and involve students more actively than we often think is possible.