BU Research Blog

The Mysterious Methods of a Murderer 

During the summer I came up with the idea of creating an innovative teaching tool focusing on qualitative research methods. It was not much of a jump to go to my love of cosy murder mysteries and decided to create a murder mystery game which uses different methodologies as key characters in the game with the student group as the detective.

I enlisted the help of Richard Williams to help me. We wanted to create an immersive experience which used game-based learning to engage the learners in this seminar.

We asked colleagues to play different characters in different scenarios and be filmed, such as, the murder scene, interrogations, secret recordings and the reveal scene. I also wrote diaries and love letters as learning materials with plenty of clues in.

The notion is that each character in the game is a research method or related to research in some way. The characters of the game are, Dr Phenomenology, Professor Grounded Theory, Dr Autoethnography, Professor Biography, Dr Ethnography and Professor Quantitative. Other key characters are also included, Mr Relativism and Mr Positivism, Associate Professor Co-Production and Dr Values as well as Professor Ethics.

The story is as follows; a funding bid is being written to explore why people commit murder. During the write up of the funding bid Professor Quantitative is poisoned. Each character in the game has a unique motive to murder Quantitative and suspicions are high.

To play the game, the learners need to work in teams to investigate who done-it! They are given clues to take them to different places in the building where they will find different materials (films made by us, a virtual simulation of the murderer’s office and also written materials). They have quizzes, puzzles and questions to answer as they navigate the game to help consolidate their learning.

Last week we played the game with third year social work students. The student feedback from playing the game was extremely positive, saying it was fun, engaging, immersive and most importantly, they felt that through playing the game they learnt a lot about qualitative research methods.

Some feedback is as follows:

“It was a fun and different way to learn”

“It was very engaging and interactive; made me develop critical ways of thinking”

“Each character was given a good back story which helped me to learn more about the different types of research”

“The humour helped with engagement and made the experience enjoyable and memorable”

“It was easy to understand, very engaging and inclusive for all”

Dr Louise Oliver
Senior Lecturer in Social Work
LOliver@bournemouth.ac.uk