On Friday, March 1, the Health Sciences Library hosted an escape room activity for the 95 first-year Optometry students enrolled in Community Health. We designed this interactive game to give students an opportunity to implement the information literacy skills that we covered in a lecture earlier that week.

The skills covered included the following:

• Locating the Optometry Resources guide
• Identifying an empirical, peer-reviewed research article
• Applying PICO to a database search
• Using PubMed to obtain full-text articles
• Finding journal impact factors

16 teams of 5-7 students competed against the clock and each other in order to solve a series of 8 tasks, presented in a mix of online and physical format clues.

Our winning team, iCare(tm) [pictured below], finished in 19 minutes 57 seconds. Everyone was able to complete the activity within the allotted time, plus or minus a few extra hints. 🙂

This foray into gamification was a success – everyone learned something and had fun. We are looking forward to facilitating similar activities in the future.

iCare(tm) finished first with a time of 19:57.