Unlocking Learning: JMU Librarians Share Educational Escape Room Game on OSF

What if teaching students to evaluate sources could be an interactive adventure? That’s the creative approach behind the Science Sleuths Source Evaluation Escape Room game, designed by James Madison University (JMU) librarians Kathryn E. Shenk and Liana Bayne-Lin. 

Originally created for a STEM conference aimed at middle school girls, Science Sleuths invites learners to solve puzzles and unlock codes while gaining essential research skills. The game introduces students to SIFT & PICK, a source evaluation strategy, while also building critical thinking skills and confidence.

The project isn’t just creative— it’s also accessible and adaptable. By hosting their materials on the Open Science Framework (OSF), Shenk and Bayne-Lin enable educators worldwide to adapt and build on their game, expanding its impact far beyond its original audience. 

Though OSF is best known as a platform for researchers to share their work openly, educators like Shenk and Bayne-Lin are showcasing its potential as a hub for storing, sharing, and collaborating on teaching materials and classroom resources.

By combining innovative teaching methods with the versatility of OSF, Shenk and Bayne-Lin demonstrate how open science principles can enhance learning experiences across age groups and settings. In this Q&A, the librarians discuss their gamified approach to source evaluation, and how OSF facilitates open collaboration and information sharing.

What inspired you to use an escape room game to teach source evaluation?

While we primarily work with college students at JMU, this game wasn’t initially designed for university students. JMU hosts madiSTEM, an annual conference that exposes area middle school girls to STEM activities and the careers of women in STEM. We both started our positions as Science & Math Librarians in the 2023-24 school year, and immediately wanted to get involved with madiSTEM when we learned about it, since we are two women working in STEM librarianship.

Because our audience was middle schoolers, we knew the session needed to have a large element of play. We wanted to craft a lesson that taught students the necessary research skill of source evaluation, but in a setting that felt welcoming and fun. Often, source evaluation is taught using checklists or “habits,” and students are not provided with an opportunity to “try out” these new skills. It is assumed that the lesson alone is enough to make students proficient evaluators. Games, and in our case, an escape room, provide a safe space where students feel encouraged to try, stumble, and then try again with their new knowledge. In this game, students learn about the SIFT & PICK source evaluation strategy, then apply it as they work together in teams to “escape” the room.

How did you adapt the SIFT & PICK strategy for middle schoolers?

SIFT & PICK was originally developed by Ellen Carey as an expansion on the work of Mike Caulfield. Caulfield developed SIFT, which emphasizes lateral reading skills; Carey added the PICK elements, which emphasize vertical reading skills and reintroduces elements that students may be familiar with from other source evaluation models. When using SIFT & PICK with middle schoolers, we kept our instruction very high-level, providing an entry-level introduction to each of the method’s components. 

Our main learning goals were to teach the hallmarks of reliable sources, and to encourage students to slow down to encourage critical thinking and verify claims across several credible sources. We prefer teaching SIFT & PICK together because we believe it’s more holistic – students need to be able to read laterally and vertically in order to develop good source evaluation skills that can serve them in multiple research and life contexts.

Because of time constraints, within the game’s context, the instructor has already performed SIFT on a number of topics, and each team must practice the PICK strategies to choose the best resources.

What are the "Evidence Folders" in the game, and how do students use them?

The game consists of three rounds. In each round, students receive an “Evidence Folder” with a set of resources to evaluate. Each folder contains three items, so by the end of the game, students will have evaluated nine potential resources on the same topic. We included documents like peer-reviewed articles, websites, newspaper articles, magazine articles, blog posts, and social media posts. In a spirit of inclusivity and staying on track, we printed everything in hard copy to ensure that everyone had easy access.

With each “Evidence Folder,” students are asked to evaluate the three resources. Each resource has a letter attached. Students use their “Code Card” to mark off letters associated with the unhelpful resources, which, after three rounds, leaves three letters remaining. These letters are used to form a word, with the aid of the “Code Builder Card.” Students then use the “Cipher Card” to create the code needed to unlock the box and escape the room! 

This is a good example of how the source evaluation process, and more broadly, the research process, works. The instructors identify resources on a given topic using SIFT skills, then the students narrow those down to the best resources using their PICK skills.

Can you give an example of a real-world problem students solve in the game?

We intentionally selected topics that have some level of debate, to ensure that we could pull a diverse selection of resources. We posed each topic as a research question that could have led students to select the nine resources on their given topic. Our questions included: Is climate change reversible? Is wind energy a good source of renewable energy? Will humans be able to live on Mars? What are the two sides of the animal use debate? Are genetically modified foods safe? And, is colloidal silver effective?
We selected resources from the scholarly literature, as well as documents from social media, blogs, and other websites.

Why did you choose OSF to host your game materials?

Kathryn had previously used OSF to store her homegrown course worksheets and handouts. As librarians, we do not always have a straightforward way to get a link out to a class of students, but if a document is hosted in OSF, then students can easily get the materials.

OSF allows educators to build their own repository of teaching artifacts. In our experience, librarians like sharing lesson ideas with one another, so storing lesson plans, activities and worksheets, creative resources such as our game, and conference materials (just to name a few), are all ways that OSF contributes to information sharing.

Finally, OSF’s principles of open sharing are in line with our own values. We both are committed to practicing and supporting open science and education, so it makes sense to host our materials here to encourage colleagues to interact with OSF.

How does OSF support collaboration with other educators?

The only way that others can adapt our materials is by making our resources easily accessible. Within OSF, we have all our game-play materials, except for documents to fill the “Evidence Folders,” available as PDFs. 

There are two reasons that we couldn’t make these resources available. First, because of copyright and licensing issues: providing PDFs to journal articles is not possible or ethical. Instead, we opted to tell colleagues that as a part of modifying the game for their specific context, each instructor must select their own materials. Second, the instructor going through the SIFT & PICK process to select their own materials also ensures that they are very familiar with both that process and the materials they’re giving to students.

However, every other element of the game is freely adaptable and available in OSF. We even have a document with links to editable Canva templates, to make adaptation even easier.

In addition to game-play resources, we provide links to other scholarly products that mention our game, such as conference presentations and articles. These supporting documents help to provide educators with additional game context. OSF makes it possible to store all our Science Sleuths resources together for easy sharing and adaptation.

What OSF features have been most valuable for this project?

This is a “living” project. We plan to iterate elements of the game, like research topics and resources, and maybe even the lesson plan or game rules, in response to feedback we receive as we use the game over time and with different audiences. We plan to offer it again at madiSTEM this spring; we played it with adults at our state library conference; and we hope to offer it to first-year students as a special library workshop in the future. The advantage of OSF is that if we update the game's materials, we can make changes to the files without changing the stable URL that we previously shared with colleagues.

If a reader finds our link in a publication, we want the link to work. If a conference attendee wants to try out our game upon returning home, we want the link to work. Even if we add additional resources or make changes to pre-existing files, we want a stable location for our materials. OSF makes it possible to have the game’s materials in one place. We can continually update our documents, and users are able to easily access our resources.

How can this game be adapted for different audiences and educational settings?

The game is easily differentiated by providing various levels of materials in the “Evidence Folders.” For example, when we developed the game for middle schoolers, we made sure to choose grade-level appropriate resources such as magazines or excerpts from social media. To adapt it for high schoolers or beyond, scholarly peer-reviewed sources might be included. An educator could also adjust the topics to reflect what was discussed in their classroom. The advantage of the game is its flexibility! The resources that the instructor chooses to include for evaluation drive the students’ learning and engagement experience.