The website leads participants through a story about a Professor who needs help with their data management. The escape room we created consists of six tasks related to the following data management topics: Only for one puzzle do participants need to leave the room, and this they can do by using a link from a clue in the room. It contains a number of puzzles, connected to items in the office, which can each be solved by looking for clues inside the room itself.
Our Data Horror Escape Room is set in a Professor's office. What’s inside the Data Horror Escape Room? Digital escape rooms, as well as physical escape rooms, are often used in educational settings where they can be used individually, but are often most successful when used by a team. There is usually a theme and a story that brings the puzzles together. What is an Escape Room?Īn escape room is a game where a team of players has to solve a set of puzzles to “escape” the room in which they are “locked”. In order to be able to introduce some data management concepts in a light-hearted way, members of the data management support teams at VU Amsterdam, TU Eindhoven, and Leiden University Libraries, Centre for Digital Scholarship, developed together a Data Horror Escape Room that introduces and tests basic knowledge of RDM concepts.
Game-based learning can help both to increase a person's knowledge, and to reinforce existing knowledge, and because games are fun, they can offer a good way to start engagement and further discussion, breaking down barriers that people sometimes perceive in those more formal settings. We wanted to see if we could find a way of getting researchers to start thinking about RDM outside the more-formal environments of a traditional training session or meeting. It is therefore important to try to introduce good RDM practices to researchers at an early stage of their research, or to catch the attention of experienced researchers who may benefit from changing their habits. Furthermore, the benefits of good data management are not always very obvious to researchers in the early stages of their project and potential problems that might have been avoided may only become visible much later, for example when wanting to combine data sets or re-use previously collected data. Researchers already have lots of administration to take care of, and learning about data management protocols and good practice can seem like an onerous task to add to the list. IntroductionĮngaging researchers with research data management (RDM) can sometimes be difficult.
The Data Horror Escape Room was a collaboration between Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Lena Karvovskaya and Elisa Rodenburg), Leiden University Libraries (Joanne Yeomans), and Eindhoven University of Technology (Anne Aarts and Bart Aben). Guest co-authors: Lena Karvovskaya and Elisa Rodenburg, VU Amsterdam, with Joanne Yeomans, Leiden University Libraries.
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