Where’s Indy in the Middle East – an EscapEDX

Mysterious dark tunnel. Man facing wall with torch.

What do you get when you marry a virtual reality escape room with Knowledge Avatar teach-bots? You get EscapEDX, an escape educational experience, a new concept in online learning.

Knowledge Avatars and F.A.I.L. University have partnered to provide an EscapEDX gaming experience.

What is an escape room? An escape room, also known as an escape game, is a game in which a team of players cooperatively discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms to progress and achieve a specific goal, usually in a limited amount of time. Escape rooms generally have a theme. A gamemaster typically provides hints.

Physical escape rooms have popped up in North America, Europe, and East Asia since the 2010s.

The Knowledge Avatars escape room, Where’s Indy in the Middle East, is an entirely self-directed game room experience where students meet in Virtual Reality (VR).

While in VR, students collaborate to solve the puzzles. Once solved, they enter the escape room code into the S-Portal, which takes them to a new room. A Knowledge Avatar bot, an artificial intelligence, provides hints and riddles.

The first product, Where’s Indy in the Middle East, has students collaborate in real-time, in virtual rooms, looking for clues to various puzzles. There’s an escape room for each learning adventure branch: Geography, Historical Timeline, Early Civilization, and Multicultural Coexistence.

In the Geography Escape Room, students will be developing Geographic and Multicultural Literacy. With thematic maps, they will analyze the relative differences in oil wealth throughout the Middle East. They will draw comparisons among the impacts geography has had on Middle Eastern culture and history.

In the Timeline Escape Room, they will develop Numerical Literacy.  Students will calculate years in both BC/AD and BCE/CE dates. They will also establish Historical Literacy by ordering critical events in the history of the first civilization’s birth. Furthermore, students will categorize examples of geography’s impact on human civilizations’ development in terms of cause and effect.

Students will compare and contrast maps to define the region that bore the first civilization in the Earliest Civilization Escape Room. Students will draw comparisons among the impacts the Tigris & Euphrates Rivers have had on civilizations’ development. Students will derive common characteristics of cultures and reconcile varied depictions of the region that bore the first civilization. Students will be able to translate ancient cuneiform sentences using an incomplete key.

In the Coexistence Escape Room Historical and Multicultural Literacy, Students will use a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the three monotheistic religions that originated in the Middle East: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

They will synthesize information from multiple sources to find similarities among the three monotheistic Middle Eastern religions. Students will evaluate the importance of the similarities among the three monotheistic Middle Eastern religions. They will analyze the origins of religious conflict(s) in the Middle East from the perspective of each of the three monotheistic Middle Eastern religions.

Schools can subscribe to Where’s Indy in the Middle East for $69, giving access to up to 25 students. Families can also participate for just $29 for up to 6 people. A teacher or parent can request a free trial account.

You may be at home this season because of the pandemic or lousy weather. Here is a new way to enjoy some quality time with friends or family!

About the author: Emiliano De Laurentiis
I make learning easier with ed-tech tools that I create.

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