The futures of futures studies
Pushing the boundaries of futures thinking

Collaborative virtual reality for teaching Strategic Foresight: the “Future Exploration" escape room.

Escape room "Future Exploration" seeks to become a new way of
teaching-learning the concepts, approaches, methodologies, and tools
of Strategic Foresight, through the design of a virtual collaborative
learning space based on the solution of conceptual challenges.
Experience is conceptualized as a space trip with takeoff, space station
and landing. Space station is made up of four themed rooms with
specific challenges.
Room 1 "The future in the past" is made up of three spaces that cover
prehistory, ancient civilizations, and native cultures, solving conceptual
challenges about approaches and concepts of Strategic Foresight.
Room 2 "The futurists today” is dedicated to study of futures at present
through the work of prestigious world futurists, solving conceptual
challenges on Foresight strategies, attitudes towards the future and
Foresight approaches. Prospective methodologies are studied in room
3 “The exploration of futures”, challenges consist in taking an ordered
tour of the four stages of the prospective process to find and organize
the clues about some prospective tools. Finally, the future is studied in
room 4 "Tomorrowland", where challenge is to find and organize clues
about the types of scenarios and their characteristics.
This educational innovation has provided students with a virtual
environment for collaborative learning of Strategic Foresight in a playful and experiential way with visual and auditory effects. And opened a range of possibilities to propose flexible learning activities for
conceptual study of Strategic Foresight to be used as learning,
evaluation, review, affirmation and/or conclusion of contents.