Five members of the North Lanarkshire Digital Learning Team have attended the Data Education Professional Learning course over the past two years. The Digital Learning Team work across over 155 primary, secondary and special schools in the region, supporting 3,700 teachers to integrate effective digital literacies and pedagogies into their teaching.
In 2025, after attending the professional learning session on data Escape Rooms, the North Lanarkshire team decided to create a set of localised data escape room resources for their region’s schools as they felt this approach offered a way to get real engagement with data literacy in a fun, stimulating and cross-disciplinary way. All DES resources are creative commons licensed and are free for anyone to download, adapt and reuse so the team took the Data Escape Room template and re-designed and re-situated them in recognisable locations for North Lanarkshire pupils.
Impact
Over 1000 teachers have accessed the materials either via Sharepoint or Padlet and the digital team fed back that the escape room approach offered ways to engage pupils with a subject that they might not have previously been interested it. They were interacting with data sets such as graphs, tables, maps etc in order to solve puzzles and complete stories and this problem-solving, storytelling approach worked effectively in the classroom setting.
The resources developed have been made openly available to schools beyond North Lanarkshire: NLC Digital School – Magical Monsters’ Mystical Quest.
Next Steps
Three schools have been shortlisted to win a live lesson from the digital learning team through engagement with the North Lanarkshire escape room activities and the team will be following up directly with these schools in the coming months.
The next phase of resources to be developed by the digital team will focus on AI literacy as well as data literacy.
“The Data Escape rooms provide an opportunity to really engage pupils at all levels with Data literacy. The approach is fun and playful, and an authentically cross-curriculum activity that uses data to solve problems and tell stories across different learning levels. We plan to extend the work we have already done to the topic of AI literacy; to introduce more awareness of this important subject into the curriculum.”
– North Lanarkshire Digital Team