The Fuzzy and the Techie by Scott Hartley

Author:Scott Hartley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Escape Rooms Inspire Student-Led Learning

James Sanders has had a number of light-bulb moments in his life. The most recent came while he was playing an escape room game in Edmonton, Canada. Escape games are problem-solving situations where participants must solve a series of clues and puzzles to escape from a physical room within a specific timeframe. Similar to whodunit games like Clue, escape room games leap into real life. For video game aficionados, they are analog role-playing games. For theater buffs, they’re immersive theater, similar to performance installations such as Sleep No More, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth performed by London’s Punchdrunk theater group and brought to life in a multistory mansion in Manhattan. But in Canada, James Sanders was there to attend the Google Education Summit with a group of high school students and teachers, and they had decided that playing an escape game would be a great way to spend their evening. Sanders was struck that a group of students would willingly choose to spend their night off playing a game that required them to do some intensive critical thinking. He saw an engagement and enthusiasm in their collaboration that he knew could be magical in the classroom.

Sanders, a classic liberal arts undergraduate, studied social studies and history at Western Washington University, where he developed a strong interest in education. He became involved in a revamping of the educational requirements at the school, a component of which was finding ways for the university to leverage technology tools better. Upon graduating, he won a coveted spot in the Teach for America program and then took a teaching job in South Los Angeles, eventually earning his master of arts in education at Loyola Marymount University and becoming a sixth-grade English and social studies teacher at Carnegie Middle School in Carson, California.

Sanders saw that his students didn’t have great access to the new tools of learning, but he was undaunted. In 2009, he decided to take his entire classroom online and was the first teacher in America to go paperless, having his students work via Google Chromebooks instead. As an early adopter of the technology, he was able to get the devices directly from Google. His students loved it, and Google was so impressed, it asked him to come on board as a part-time contractor to advise on the development of its marketing strategy for the Chromebook.

Sanders took a further plunge into tech-based education when he decided to join the video-streaming service YouTube, becoming the company’s project manager for all education initiatives, and creating YouTube for Teachers and YouTube for Education. “When I joined,” he recalls, “YouTube was where you found cat videos, not educational videos.” Though he loved his work at YouTube, by mid-2012, he had met Esther Wojcicki and the two came up with an idea for a technology-enabled educational tool—digital badges, or customizable digital accolades that teachers could use to reward their students for mastery of a certain subject. Similar to a Girl Scout or Boy Scout badge,

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