How can an escape room help in education?
Escape rooms are hugely popular with students — indeed one of their main audiences comes from schools. Like Időcsapda, most escape rooms also offer a student discount. Using escape-game logic in education is a great way to motivate learners to engage more deeply with a topic.
How can we combine escape rooms with education, without financial or long-term investment?
Children love surprises and riddles, so from a very young age they are happy to build their abilities through playful tasks. As with younger children, it matters for older ones too that every game has a story of its own, because that develops not only their creativity and problem-solving but their imagination as well. The stories should be devised so that it is immediately obvious that this is teamwork — we solve the puzzle together. That is also a simple way to develop peer relationships, and an escape room is the best way to do it.
Why is a school escape room a good idea?
Beyond the reasons above there are many other positive effects that are demonstrably good for children. One — perhaps the most important — is that it is a perfect team-building exercise. In today’s online world children are rarely alone, yet even when they play together, everyone is driven by their own success, and online exclusion is not uncommon. An online escape room, by contrast, brings students together as they work on the puzzle side by side. They also have to talk to one another, which is a great way to develop communication skills. Several people working towards a shared goal is also excellent training in self-knowledge, since it helps with managing stress. And not least: we learn while playing.
What makes a good escape room?
Escape rooms have a few key principles worth keeping in mind when teaching students. First, you need to define a goal: what do they have to do in order to escape? Then it is time to think about clues that lead, through puzzles and various tasks, to the final solution. Then, of course, something that opens with a combination or an access code. And finally, the thing every escape room has in common: the time limit within which they must escape.
The goal
You can invent any backstory you like, simple or elaborate. The key consideration where escape rooms and education meet is aligning the content with the curriculum. Students might be looking for lost treasure, or tracking down a small endangered species. Perhaps they are searching for the antidote to a virus, or trying to find an amulet? Once the escape room is built, it helps if the end goal is something tangible.
Clues
Solving the puzzles yields clues, which can be words or sequences of random letters or numbers. These clues serve as content, or as the material needed for understanding and memorising. Take, for example, a worksheet with multiple-choice and true-or-false questions. Group the questions into sets of four or five! Every question and the answer it produces can be a clue. With multiple-choice questions, the correct answers can spell out the word that lets the students move on. For a bigger challenge the letters can be scrambled, so they have to work out the right answer themselves. You can also build a quiz where they fill in the blanks. Be creative, and mix up the different types of exercise.
Something to open
Many people have heard of Google Forms. It is one of the simplest ways to build a genuinely solvable escape room online. You can set what kind of “lock” each question is — a date, a number sequence or a word in capital letters. As a reference, here is a Google Form that can serve as inspiration.
The deadline
A time limit isn’t compulsory, of course, but most school tests have one and it makes the whole game more exciting. Do judge the time carefully, so that a tight window doesn’t leave stressed students underperforming. The point is that they learn in an enjoyable way.
Escape rooms and education
Classic teaching methods are dated, and there is scientific evidence that alternative approaches often work better for students and teachers alike. Through play, learners can develop important cross-curricular skills such as logic and communication, which the programme lets them work on. Escape rooms allow students to understand team spirit, especially when they are competing against other teams.
