Escape Training Monotony by Hosting an Escape Room

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requires Operations personnel to periodically attend Dam Safety Training so that they are prepared to prevent or respond to a dam safety emergency. It is at times difficult to keep their attention and help them to retain the information presented. While planning the 2022 Dam Safety Training sessions for the Wilmington District, I considered my audience’s potential learning styles, the training topics for that year, and cost-effective ways to make the training memorable and easily adaptable to each of my projects. I found an escape room (a series of puzzles fit to a storyline that are solved by a team to reach a goal) complemented a combination of traditional classroom and hands-on training and improved student engagement. To prepare for the escape room training activity, I conducted trial sessions with coworker volunteers. After observing their attempts at the puzzles, I revised the activities to ensure dam safety knowledge and not puzzle skills were being tested. I also made adjustments between training sessions to accommodate various training locations and class sizes (ranging from 7 to 27 students). I conducted the training with four classes, reusing props and puzzles but tailoring the information each time to match the uniqueness of the six different dams cared for by the various student groups. All classes provided positive feedback. The escape room activity not only showed retention of information, but also demonstrated that students could apply that knowledge in a practical way. Dam Safety Training providers can easily adapt the escape room activity to suit their own projects and training goals while reducing the monotony often experienced with routine training.