Hillhurst Elementary - Week 2
How do soft skills affect the end result of a project?
It’s a question that impacts all spheres of life and building a user experience like an escape room is no exception.
What are soft skills? Well, our tagline awaken “wonder” certainly contains one of them.
I like to think of soft skills as the aspects of life that are often overlooked as not being “essential” such as love, kindness, joy, collaboration, peace, belief, patience, humility, optimism and so on. You might not find these attributes listed on a job posting, but they continue to reveal themselves to me as critical ingredients of what it means to live well. Sure, you can accomplish something without them, maybe even accomplish something great, but there’s a certain degree of grace and longevity and ease that comes from a team that shows kindness to one another, collaborates well, believes in their mission, is humble when confronted and stays positive despite setbacks.
These soft skills were on display last week at Hillhurst Elementary as I had the chance to work with grades 3-5 to build a fur-trade-themed escape room. Even after building over 100 rooms over the course of the past 6 years or so, I’m still experiencing firsts:
This was my first Fur Trade theme room - although not the first that our company has done. I loved the challenge!
It was my first time using a fold-out stage and accordion-style walls as the parameters of the room. Very fun!
We adapted the escape room format as per feedback from the previous week at Hillhurst; this allowed us to include more puzzles and run the room as a points-gathering time trial instead of a traditional escape game.
The mission of the room was to collect as many fur pelts as possible in 10 minutes by solving up to 7 puzzles. The stand-alone puzzles allowed for multiple avenues of solving to happen simultaneously. The only exception to that was the locked Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. You can’t trade for furs if you can’t get into the trading post!
This was one of my favourite escape rooms that I’ve helped students make. A number of the puzzles were really well-executed, including a spinning target, an anagram, colour matching, a giant block puzzle, camouflage, and more. And when I challenged the students to adapt or finish or extend their plans in some way, they rose to the challenge. The younger ones especially created more content than I expected!
It was evident to me that the maker-desire among these students was very strong; every day I asked them what their favourite part was so far, and each time I heard about whatever it was they were creating the day before. It reminded me that students love to apply themselves through inquiry-based learning. They lean into the areas that they are naturally drawn to and excel uniquely. They took great pride in their work and wanted to show it off to students and parents on showcase day at the end of the week.
How do we measure success in a scenario like this?
I think it comes back to the soft skills. It’s not just about IF showcase happened, but HOW it happened. The long line of parents was indication that students had been talking about the escape room at home and parents needed to know, “What’s going on at that school?!” There was energy and enthusiasm in the room, avid engagement from students, and I even got my first thank-you cards of the year!
Which brings me to my last soft skill: gratitude. The staff and students at Hillhurst expressed their gratitude to me throughout the week, and I to them. And I think it made us a stronger group. Even though we didn’t NEED to encourage one another or compliment each other or say “Thank you” in order to build a functional escape game, we did anyways. And what affect did that have?
Camaraderie. Respect. Joy.
This week reminded me anew of how important it is to be grateful, for if we cannot see even the smallest goodness around us and express appreciation for it, what will motivate us to continue to find (and create) the good? To look a little deeper next time? To be curious?
And it’s not just about noticing goodness (although that is critical) but it’s also about creating goodness through communication. When we speak, we create reality. When we use our words to compliment and encourage, we lift others up and allow them to be their best selves.
I am convinced: gratitude can create space for wonder to be awakened; and it is when we wonder that we realize all the goodness we have not yet known.