Facilitator’s guide

The Data Horror Escape Room is an online game primarily designed to be played by university staff (both researchers and research support staff) and students. It introduces and enables discussion around research data management (RDM) concepts in a fun way.

The game can be played in two ways: as a self-directed learning experience, or in small groups during a live event with a facilitator. As a facilitator, your job is to provide support and assistance, while also fostering reflection and discussion among the groups. Ideally, you should have some knowledge of RDM to effectively address questions. The following notes are intended to help you prepare for hosting and facilitating an interactive session using the Data Horror Escape Room.

Spoiler Warning

Do not read this document if you want to play the game without knowing the answers.

Preparation

We highly recommend that you complete the game yourself before facilitating a session for others, and of course, you might like to recruit some friends or colleagues to play with you and help out as it is more fun to play the game with others.

To give you the same experience that your gamers will have, we recommend playing the game before reading the sections below containing spoilers.

We advise you not to give away any information in advance that will enable your participants to find and play the game before your session. Once the game is completed, it is very easy to play again, so if people have already tried it out, it will spoil the fun.

How long does it take?

• The Data Horror Escape Room takes a minimum of 40 minutes with fast work and excellent team collaboration; more commonly, it takes around one hour or slightly longer.
• We recommend a session of 1 hour 30 minutes for introduction, game, and post-game discussion.
• If you have a session of less than an hour, you can start the game during the session and invite participants to complete it together, or alone, after the session. Because the room is an open website, participants can access it at any time.
• To continue the game at a later date, participants should make a note of which puzzles have been solved because the website does not track, or record any information from individual players.
• If your session isn’t long enough to play the game to the end, participants will still have encountered aspects of research data management that can be discussed and you can focus on these, avoiding discussing how the puzzles are actually solved.
• Try to keep the introduction brief to maximize time for completion and allow the participants to discover for themselves how the game works. It’s likely that some of your participants will have played an escape room before, and they will be able to get going very quickly. For those less experienced, offer individual support to help them on their way.

How do I set things up?

• Every team needs at least one computer and an internet connection.
• Participants will also need to make a few small notes so either you can ensure they have pens and paper, or you can suggest they make notes on their computer or mobile phone.
• At one point during the game, participants will encounter a video that they need to watch. It has sound, but can be played on mute with subtitles.
• The ideal team size is 2-6 people. You can have as many teams as you wish playing simultaneously.
• You can consider having a prize for the fastest team to complete the game.

Notes for playing during a virtual/online event

• If playing the game during an online event, plan the following in advance:
  • how to divide the group into teams
  • how to answer questions from the teams whilst playing the game
  • how to send information, if needed, to all teams during the game
  • what instructions to give teams who are not physically co-located (for example, one person will need to share their screen and control the mouse)
  • what to do when some teams have finished the game and others are still playing
• If available, it is easiest to use the Breakout Rooms with the self-assign functionality, then participants can sort themselves into the breakout rooms of their choice. Sorting a large number of participants into breakout rooms as a facilitator is overwhelming and takes some time.

What happens when people finish?

• Consider whether, and therefore how, you would like participants to confirm they have completed the game. If they complete it during the session they might just shout out, if they complete it afterwards, you could ask them to make a screenshot of the finished data management plan.
• Make plans to keep players busy after completing the game whilst they wait for the other teams to finish. For example, you could provide prompts for each team to discuss among themselves topics raised in the game, or you could provide other RDM materials to look at and discuss.
• When all teams have finished the game, or you decide that the time is over (and they can complete the game after the session), take a look at the discussion points below.

Starting the session

Some participants might not have previously encountered an escape room game. If so, a small amount of explanation is useful. Sometimes, other participants are keen to explain their own experiences of escape rooms to the group.

A digital escape room is a series of puzzles that must be solved in order to unlock a door that allows the participants to escape and therefore complete the game. The game will guide you, and there are hints, but you should be able to figure out what to do and how to do it whilst playing the game.

• It’s usual in an escape room to have little or no explanation about the kinds of puzzles that need to be solved, or how to escape. Participants have to figure that out for themselves as part of the fun. So don’t give too much away when explaining how an escape room works
• The room is designed to prompt discussion both during and after play, so encourage people to talk.
• You don’t need to know anything about RDM before playing the game: it is not a test. But some puzzles are harder than others! A little RDM knowledge, or experience playing escape rooms, might help you complete it faster.
• Explain to participants what they should do to signal that they have completed the game.
• Explain to participants what they should do if they need help whilst playing the game. Note that on some puzzle pages there is a hint that will help complete the puzzle.

Discussion points

Regardless of the audience, the game usually generates excitement and so it is worth making some time immediately after playing to reflect, de-brief, and discuss the game together.

Possible discussion points include:

• Did you like playing the game? Why (or why not)?
• Did anything surprise you when you played the game?
• Did you learn anything, from the game itself or from your teammates?
• Which question did you find most difficult to answer?
• Do you think the Escape Room represents common issues in data management? How do these issues vary for different research areas? What issues have you personally encountered?
• Did you have discussions with your teammates? What did you discuss?
• Did anything during the game (including your struggles or mistakes) prompt you to think about why or how we should do research data management?
• Whilst playing the game, did you see any parallels between the way you organised your team and the different roles in the research process?

Of course, as a facilitator, you may want to focus on certain discussion areas, add questions that are relevant to your participants, or leave out discussion points that are not relevant.

How to play the Escape Room

• There are 6 puzzles which can be solved in any order. All pages allow players to return to the central page from which they navigate to the puzzles. Each puzzle delivers one code word upon completion. The six words must be put into the correct order to unlock the final part of the game and escape.
• The final puzzle is to unlock the Professor’s computer and submit the data management plan. The full computer code is obtained by completing the 6 puzzles and working out the order of the words that makes most sense.
• The game is a static website. It does not remember which puzzles have been completed or record a team’s progress.
• Hints are included where people have traditionally struggled (see the answers section below). You might need to give extra tips, or help players understand an answer.
• Players have finished the game when they find the completed data management plan. If a prize is involved, verify that they have reached that page.
• In a live event, a team can shout out when they have finished. Facilitators can give more specific instructions to provide proof that the game was completed. If relevant, you can tell participants that they should take a screenshot of the data management plan so that they can prove that they have completed the game. If you are awarding a prize for the fastest team, the data management plan contains a time stamp.

Solutions

Puzzles

Complete solution for unlocking the computer

GOOD PLANNING HELPS AVOID DATA HORROR

Distractions

• Looking at the posters outside the room gives no useful information for completing the game, but is fun nonetheless!
• The pile of waste paper in the bin is a distraction but might prompt discussion about how, and whether, data should be destroyed.
• The map on the wall with numbers is a distraction that does not help with solving the puzzles, it is included merely for fun.
• You are asked to read the data management plan (DMP) before submitting it - but this is not necessary to complete the game. During discussion, you might like to return to the DMP (or your own institution’s) to discuss data management planning in more detail.

The notice board puzzle

The notice board game is the most difficult and involves taking several steps to complete:

1. understanding that an ORCID is a unique number identifying a person, in this case someone called “Pablo”
2. realising that the instruction on the postcard to look at a dataset will lead to Pablo
3. working out how to find this dataset from the DOI that is given (or spotting that there’s a direct link on the DOI flyer)
4. recognizing where to find Pablo’s ORCID in the metadata of the dataset
5. using the ORCID to identify the right letters on the coded sheet back in the escape room

Playing the game is an opportunity to encourage researchers to create their own ORCID, and to explain why persistent identifiers are needed when archiving material on the web.

• The two flyers on the notice board explain ORCIDs and DOIs and can be downloaded and printed out.
• The coded sheet can only be deciphered if you know the ORCID for Pablo Colunga-Salas. Pablo is a real researcher and is the first author of the (real) dataset mentioned on the postcard.
• The DOI on the postcard can be googled to find the dataset, or the location can be found using the instructions on the DOI flyer, or there is even a direct URL-link from the example on the DOI flyer.
• The DOI leads directly to the dataset created by Pablo Colunga-Salas and his colleagues, and from where the ORCID for Pablo can be found.
• The dataset is called “Unicellular endoparasites of bats” and is archived in Zenodo, so it is possible that players could locate the dataset with a few words from the title mentioned on the postcard, the name “Pablo”, and the word “Zenodo”.
• The coded sheet also contains the word “PABLO” and other words that players might guess are relevant (metadata, ghosts, etc.) but which are decoys. If players try enough of these variations in the final sentence, they may eventually find the right answer despite not having completed this puzzle.

Reporting Issues

We hope you enjoy playing the Data Horror Escape Room and find it useful to help raise awareness about research data management. However, if you encounter problems, please open an issue at https://github.com/xi/datahorror/issues.