Where to start?
For beginning room escape game designers, the idea of creating a lesson plan that involves an electrician’s hasp, lockboxes, and UV flashlights might sound a little foreign, and A LOT overwhelming. There are a few simple steps you can do to help get your creative juices flowing, and start your game designing career.
- The best way to really understand how room escapes work is to participate in one yourself. Find a local room escape company (here in South Dakota there are a few different choices – Sioux Falls has Escape 605 and Sherlock and Company, while Rapid City has Rapid Escape Rooms and Black Hills Escape Rooms) to try out with family or colleagues. You’ll learn the basics of how escape rooms work, and you’ll begin to understand how many wonderfully education processes are happening during an escape room challenge.
- Try a “canned” or pre designed classroom room escape where all of the work has already been done for you. Even after experiencing a “real” room escape, it can still be overwhelming to try and design your own game. Starting off with a pre designed game let’s you try out a classroom room escape before putting the time and brainpower into making one of your own. Thankfully, there are several different websites that propped up in the last couple of years with plenty of pre designed games for you to choose from. BreakoutEDU and The Escape Classroom are probably the most popular websites/companies dedicated to classroom room escapes.
- Purchase a box. Before you can actually run a room escape lesson in your classroom, you’ll need to have all of the materials to do it. While companies like BreakoutEDU sell pre made kits already, the current price tag of a cringe-worthy $150 makes these kits convenient but at the higher end of a typical teacher's budget. My first kit was put together by going to local retail and hardware stores to find nearly identical materials and the price tag was only $45 with tax. I’ve included links for where to purchase the lockbox components individually if you’re a more frugal teacher-shopper like myself, who can’t quite choke down the $150 price tag for a single box.
- Find others like you! There are so many great websites out there dedicated to the art of teacher-swapping. You’ll find so many other teacher like yourself who are new to the room escape concept, you’ll find teachers with a few breakouts under their belt (like me!), and you’ll find seasoned veterans that have probably been running room escapes for longer they’ve been called “room escapes”. Use these sites to help grow your network of like-minded teacher superheros. One of my favorite forums is the Breakout EDU General Discussion on Facebook – lots of educators sharing their breakouts, their ideas for breakouts, and their passion for education!
- Start with something non-educational and fun to drive interest and engagement. This one is my own personal belief for a couple of reasons. One – if the first breakout that your students every do is NOT tied to anything they have or will be learning, this experience will be more fun and create lasting feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction. There are many studies like this one that address the concept of learning as a social process. Room escapes are inherently social, which makes them ideal for learning. However, many students I know (at least in grades 6-12) inherently frown upon “learning” in the traditional sense. If you’re first room escape is purely for fun – this will create a strong and positive connection for future learning. Two – starting with a “fun only” room escape gives you the opportunity for a trial run – so to speak – without feeling like you might have just confused your students on the content they’ve learned or are about to learn. A no-content room escape also opens up so many more possibilities for topic choices in your classroom. For example, I create my St. Valentine’s Day Massacre Room Escape for a fun Valentine’s Day activity. It was completely unrelated to the content we were learning, it was completely different than anything my students had ever learned about before in an ELA class….and it was FUN!
The Research
Room Escapes are not a new concept, and they are taking the educational world by storm. Check out some of these additional resources about the effectiveness of incorporating game-based learning, like room escapes, in your classroom.
The Rise of Educational Escape Rooms by: Zara Stone
Breakout Edu: Escape From the Traditional Classroom by: Jennie Maglera
STEM Matters: How escape rooms are helping to shape the next generation of thinkers
Breakout EDU Brings “Escape Room” Strategy to the Classroom | SLJ Review by: Phil Goerner
ROOM ESCAPE AT CLASS: ESCAPE GAMES ACTIVITIES TO FACILITATE THE MOTIVATION AND LEARNING IN COMPUTER SCIENCE - Journal of Technology and Science Education
The Rise of Educational Escape Rooms by: Zara Stone
Breakout Edu: Escape From the Traditional Classroom by: Jennie Maglera
STEM Matters: How escape rooms are helping to shape the next generation of thinkers
Breakout EDU Brings “Escape Room” Strategy to the Classroom | SLJ Review by: Phil Goerner
ROOM ESCAPE AT CLASS: ESCAPE GAMES ACTIVITIES TO FACILITATE THE MOTIVATION AND LEARNING IN COMPUTER SCIENCE - Journal of Technology and Science Education