Sepsis and an Escape Room

The clock is ticking. A sepsis patient awaits, in need of acute care. And a team of pharmacy students is trapped, huddling over a series of clues they must unlock or they will never get out…

… of class.

Students walking into Acute Care Therapeutics on February 26 were in for a surprise visit to a virtual escape room, though they never left their Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) classroom. Handed envelopes of enigmatic hints, student teams were challenged to solve a sequence of puzzles in order to ‘escape’ while a giant clock loomed in the background, counting down the allotted time.

The puzzles, which included ones that required or reinforced knowledge of sepsis therapeutics, were constructed so that a team had to solve one to advance to the next. Finishing all the puzzles allowed a team to escape by successfully treating a sepsis patient before time ran out.

The second part of class was reviewing the key learning points from the activity related to treating patients with sepsis, a potentially life-threatening condition caused by the body’s response to an infection.

Jason Haney, associate professor of clinical pharmacy and outcome sciences at the MUSC College of Pharmacy, developed this innovative approach to teaching his sepsis section last year.

“I was introduced to this style of educational gamification as a flipped classroom experience at the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy annual meeting in 2018,” he said. Gamification, or the application of typical elements of game playing to business or other disciplines, has become increasingly popular in education.

“I found the idea intriguing, so I created and piloted this escape room last year and implemented it in the spring 2019 course. The students loved it and many asked to do more!”