Imagine shrinking down to explore a patient’s heart to save their life. The students in the Nursing 430 course get to experience that in the Cardinal Simulation Lab.  Students in the simulation were given an hour to travel through the six-room challenge, modeled after the heart of the patient they were working to rescue in true Magic School Bus fashion.

The simulation team, led by the director of Nursing Simulation and Information Technology Center (NSITC), Dani Ely, built an extensive escape room for the critical care course, Nursing 430. The team, located in NSITC is charged with the creation and implementation of simulations within the College of Health.

The simulation was six full-sized escape rooms linked together to follow the path a blood cell takes through the heart. Each room represented a specific part of the heart and offered unique clues within different learning modalities that aided in the hands-on experience while helping to enhance the realism of the simulation.

The simulation team spent eight months carefully planning each clue and activity to ensure the rooms offered a clear, hands-on learning experience. From November 2024 to July 2025, the simulation team carefully curated the simulation to meet the needs of the Nursing 430 students and the standards of the International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning (INACSL).

After the pilot test in July 2025, students and faculty alike have had the opportunity to participate in and observe the escape room and have offered glowing feedback. Not only did students enjoy the experience, but there was significant improvement in their understanding between the preassessments and post assessments.

“We had someone run the statistics on it,” said Ely, “And there was a significant difference between pre and post, and then you look at their qualitative data, and they’re talking about how much fun they had. They worked as a team.”

The simulation has been another feather in the cap of the College of Health’s simulation team. Its success has opened the door to more creative projects in the future and is paving a path for innovative methods to connect students with the material in ways that align with different modalities of learning.

As the Nursing 430 escape room reaches the first year mark, the simulation team is coming down from the final push for its success and preparing for its next undertaking.

“I think it’ll just be like who approaches and says, ‘Hey, these are my objectives. Like, can you dream this up?’” Ely noted, “and we would be there to do it.”