The final exam for Basic Phonetics in Fall 2025 was anything but basic, thanks to Lecturer Erin Leeming and the technology at the College of Health Professions and Sciences’ Rehabilitation Innovation Center. The course culminated in an escape room simulation in which students worked in groups to “escape” a doctor’s office filled with clues written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and hidden in an immersive simulation room.
The IPA is a universal system that uses symbols to represent speech sounds. It’s a foundational skill for speech-language pathologists (SLP) who use the IPA to track and target a client’s articulation of speech sounds during speech therapy.
“I was really excited to try this because I feel like you can see everything that we’ve built up to and everything that I’ve been teaching throughout the course,” Leeming says. “This is even more real world for students to be able to read somebody else’s transcription and figure out what a client said and how they said it.”
Held in the Blended Learning Interactive Simulation Suite (BLISS), students had 20 minutes to use the suite’s three touchscreen, interactive walls to solve a series of clues written in IPA that led students to complete tasks and locate specific items around the “room” to look for a way to escape. Students moved through the exercise in groups of five or six, testing their phonetic skills as well as encouraging communication and collaboration.
“This could easily be a class where you just make it about memorization, and a teacher could say ‘Here’s symbols you have to memorize for a test,’ ” says student Carrie Miles. “This was a really great way to take all the things that we learned throughout the year and apply them to actual language and actual conversation, because when we get to the real world, we’re not going to be memorizing something off a piece of paper. We’re going to have to be listening and reading transcriptions and applying the things that we know about phonetics that way.”
More than 120 undergraduate communication sciences and disorders students moved through the escape room, earning their final exam grade. Leeming says that the feedback and engagement from student participants was exactly what she hoped for; they found it digestible, challenging and less nerve-racking than a normal final exam.
“Incorporating this simulation technology brought a completely new perspective to teaching and testing. … It enhanced engagement and reinforced learning in a creative, fast-paced way.” — Erin Leeming, lecturer
“They like being able to see that they’ve learned something and that they’re able to use it in a different way than they might in the classroom,” Leeming says. “Incorporating this simulation technology brought a completely new perspective to teaching and testing. The field of communication sciences and disorders relies on collaboration and problem-solving, so instead of a traditional test, this gave students the opportunity to apply their skills in an interactive environment. It enhanced engagement and reinforced learning in a creative, fast-paced way.”
BLISS, the immersive simulation suite, has added a new dimension to healthcare education and clinical training possibilities for the college. The space has been used extensively for teaching and learning, with scenarios ranging from physical therapy students experiencing fragile infants in a simulated NICU, to health sciences students walking through a case study of a burn victim , to communication sciences and disorders students using interactive books in youth reading programs.
The interactive phonetics escape room is part of a broader continuum of technology-driven simulations developed within the Rehabilitation Innovation Center to model real-world complexity and support the development of workforce ready healthcare professionals.
