Liz Cable, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in Digital Marketing at Leeds Trinity, has been working with partners from France and Lithuania on the Escape Your Stereotypes project.

The goal of Escape Your Stereotypes is to create an educational escape game focused on interculturality and teaching players how to challenge and prevent discrimination against others. There will also be an accompanying ‘how-to’ guide which shows people the methodology behind developing an educational and intercultural escape game.

The game will look at the possible impacts of stereotypes and prejudices when forming new relationships, and ways of avoiding unconscious bias in intercultural interactions, through interactive puzzles and challenges – using real-time newspaper cuttings, online video articles and a computer-generated robot that tasks participants to think about how they can combat stereotypes in the future.

Liz has been working on Escape Your Stereotypes since 2019, alongside representatives from Association Odyssee, a French association which focuses on developing intercultural learning, and Kuryboslab, a Lithuanian organisation that builds educational games for young people.

Escape Your Stereotypes, which has been supported and funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission, is due to be completed at the end of February where the methodology guideline will be published and the final version of the escape game released.

Liz Cable, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in Digital Marketing at Leeds Trinity University, said: “This project has been fascinating. Working with an intercultural team has made me aware of subtle differences in the way we work, and how we frame problems and solutions. We all absolutely make assumptions every day about how others think, behave and react, and that’s really not helpful. This project is so rich in learning because we have all been challenged by it and have come up with a methodology that all youth workers and educators can use to create their own intercultural escape games.”

Marilou Breda, Project Manager at Association Odyssee, said: “Odyssee decided to work with Leeds Trinity University as we had heard about the game-based learning approach and especially with Liz Cable as pedagogical escape game designer. We wanted an expert to be able to provide the partnership with technical insight on pedagogical escape games so we could design together a game which breaks down stereotypes and prejudices.”

Escape Your Stereotypes is designed for young people including students, trainees, apprentices and volunteers, as well as youth workers and staff in schools and universities.

After the project has concluded, the aim is for the escape game and methodology to be freely accessible online so that other organisations and their networks can use them for their own learning and teaching.

Liz has been testing the game with Leeds Trinity University students in the Hurol Ozcan Enterprise Centre on its Horsforth campus, in preparation of the final version being completed.

More information can be found on the Escape Your Stereotypes website.