Learning to “Fail Forward”: Interactional Insights on Failure From an Escape Room

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Playful Learning: Games, Puzzles, and Play (Table 2)

Abstract

Failure – both conceptually and in practice – is a ripe site for theorizing learning. In the learning sciences, failure is heterogenous, with many of its semantic offshoots (e.g., uncertainty, misconception) intimating how the experience of “failing” is dependent on broader questions of context (e.g., how and where failing occurred). Drawing on data from a larger qualitative study examining how five players learned to “escape” a series of increasingly difficulty escape rooms, this paper demonstrates that learning to escape - like all multi-part phenomena - requires the conceptual breakdown of a system’s constituent components and the lamination of semiotic substrates that contribute to and advance cooperative action among individuals.

Authors

• Jon M. Wargo, University of Michigan

• Alex Corbitt, Syracuse University

• Wenfei Pei, University of Michigan