The authors investigate the potential of Mixed Reality (MR) games for team building and assessment. The AMELIO game was designed for a highly immersive MR lab. The game is a multi-player team challenge based on the concept of an escape room, staged in a space colony emergency situation. An explorative empirical pre-post measurement study was carried out to establish whether playing AMELIO influences team cohesiveness. Ten teams of three played AMELIO and filled out pre- and post-game questionnaires with validated measurements of team cohesiveness and mediating factors related to team composition, game experience and team dynamics. The findings show a positive and significant increase in team cohesiveness, with stronger effects for teams with lower pre-game familiarity. In terms of game experience and team dynamics, audio aesthetics and empathy proved to be significant mediating factors. This AIDS game validation and improvement, and understanding and guiding the team building process.
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Energy transition is key to achieving a sustainable future. In this transition, an often neglected pillar is raising awareness and educating youth on the benefits, complexities, and urgency of renewable energy supply and energy efficiency. The Master Energy for Society, and particularly the course “Society in Transition”, aims at providing a first overview on the urgency and complexities of the energy transition. However, educating on the energy transition brings challenges: it is a complex topic to understand for students, especially when they have diverse backgrounds. In the last years we have seen a growing interest in the use of gamification approaches in higher institutions. While most practices have been related to digital gaming approaches, there is a new trend: escape rooms. The intended output and proposed innovation is therefore the development and application of an escape room on energy transition to increase knowledge and raise motivation among our students by addressing both hard and soft skills in an innovative and original way. This project is interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary due to the complexity of the topic; it consists of three different stages, including evaluation, and requires the involvement of students and colleagues from the master program. We are confident that this proposed innovation can lead to an improvement, based on relevant literature and previous experiences in other institutions, and has the potential to be successfully implemented in other higher education institutions in The Netherlands.
