Educational Escape Rooms 101

Schools and libraries are incorporating escape rooms into their programming not only because it makes learning more fun, but because this type of programming is flexible, helps students' memory retention, and teaches communication skills. Students have much better recall on information they actually put to use. If the date for the start of the French Revolution is acquired by solving a puzzle and then gets them inside a locked box, your students may be more likely to recall that information on their next exam.

With so many recreational escape rooms popping up, and with so much educational value in escape rooms themselves, there's no way teachers and librarians wouldn't want to try their hand at escape room design aimed at furthering student learning. Luckily, they have options: custom-made and premade escape rooms are becoming more prevalent, with companies like Breakout EDU and Lock Paper Scissors making tools easily available for purchase.

Premade Escapes

Lock Paper Scissors provides print-and-play escape rooms that require nothing more than paper and ink. Students can cut out the pieces and glue as they go, or the moderator can have everything assembled ahead of time. Since no physical locks come with these escape rooms, the moderator acts as the lock, giving students new slips of paper if they are given the right passcodes.

Lock Paper Scissors lists the recommended ages and group size next to each of their escape rooms, which can be printed as needed so that a moderator could break up their entire class into smaller groups and have multiple sessions running all at once. Lock Paper Scissors also provides some great tips for how to craft your own puzzles and ideas on how to get started.

Breakout EDU offers escape room kits, which include boxes, a UV light, a USB drive, and a variety of locks: three-digit, four-digit, word, directional, key lock, and a hasp. Their kit also provides access to their online platform, which has instructions for escape rooms other people have created for subjects like math, literature, and science. The kit is fantastic for anyone who wants to get all their locks and boxes in one place, and any of the escape rooms online will work with the base kit. If an escape room requires anything extra, Breakout EDU states it up front in the instructions. The kits also work great for crafting your own custom rooms.

Breakout EDU's digital platform includes access to digital escape rooms and the digital escape room creator tool. Their library of digital games has been greatly expanded over the summer of 2018 and includes many topics, such as a fairy tale escape room I created. While not the most intuitive, the digital escape room creator is easy to use once you get familiar with it. It begins with uploading the ending image, text, or video to be unlocked on completion of the room and then adding locks. Each lock will have a picture, gif, text, or video to provide clues as to what the code for the lock will be; depending on the game, you might be able to open them in any order or you may have to follow a specific path from one puzzle to the next. There are a fantastic variety of locks such as color, word, and number. Lock combinations can also be short or long depending on your needs. The timer for these escape rooms is adjustable so you could build something short for a beginning of class refresher or something longer to take up the entire class period.

Accessing created escape rooms requires a link and a passcode, which means multiple sessions of your escape room can be running at once. There's a lot of versatility in Breakout EDU's digital escape room creator tool that lets you build escape rooms to suit your needs, whatever they may be.

Building a Kit

Click to Enlarge +Educational Escape Rooms 101

Also, know that at some point you'll be locked out of one of these locks through no fault of your own. It's something that can easily happen when you have so many people going through escape rooms. The best way I've found is to check passwords a letter or number away from your password; if your code is 1492 try things like 2492, 1592, or 1402. Sometimes you may just have to scrap a lock though.

Click to Enlarge +Educational Escape Rooms 101

The best way to design an escape room with your kit will be to start with your answers. Figure out what the puzzle solutions need to be for this room to impact your students: a history date, a Latin animal name, directions from Tokyo to Budapest? Once the answers are out of the way, it's time to design the puzzles themselves. Puzzles should be inspired by the theme. If the class is doing a unit on anatomy, they could find organs with numbers that need to be put back into a body which then reveals a math equation. If they're working on a Shakespeare-inspired puzzle, they could find the answer based on how many Montagues, Capulets, and others are involved in a scene.

Map your puzzle chains out in a web to make sure everything will eventually be accessible. I've had one or two escape rooms where I've nearly put what they need to solve the puzzle into the box that same puzzle opens. Props can be as embellished as needed. In the past I've used a thermoplastic called Worbla to make little plastic organs, but they could also just as easily be paper cut outs that are reprinted as necessary. Props such as stuffed animals can help your students get into the experience. Holiday sales, such as for Easter or Halloween, are a great place to go digging for ideas and set dressing.

Keep escape room puzzles simple, and never make a puzzle that will be ruined if your students move pieces around. They will move pieces around, sometimes in ways that make no sense and sometimes in ways that will have you revising the puzzle because they thought of something more brilliant than what you already had. Try to avoid red herrings if you can--you want your students to be learning, not wasting time.

The other thing to remember is to make your puzzles work for you. If the answer needs to be a date, but the only lock left is a color lock then make students translate the date into color with a key: one is green, two is blue, etc. There are all kinds of creative ways to get around these things.

I recommend slips of paper that remind students the importance of each answer. Make your most important informational answer or fun fact the final one. It will be the one they end up most excited about.

Running

Running the escape room has some of its own challenges. The big one is to avoid helping students unless they're truly and utterly stuck on a puzzle. This can be difficult, especially since some groups will either forget or refuse to use their hints. A good way to tell is if they're way off track or no one is eager to approach the puzzle that's next in the chain. In that case it's good to ask leading questions: What pieces have you used so far? Do those bits look like anything? Questions like these can lead them to discover the answer for themselves.

Make sure they have something telling them how many hints they have; pieces of paper, note cards, or playing cards work great for this. It's also a good idea to either have a place for your students to put locks that they've finished with or to take locks from them as they finish. This helps to keep from getting locked out or having your combinations accidentally reset. Keep all that in mind and you should be ready to run.

Sample Puzzle Chain

1. Insects in Fig. 1 are cut out and scattered throughout the room, and possibly inside boxes.
2. Students will match up the insects with their scientific names on the pin board in Fig. 2 to reveal a list of cities. They may do this by using a provided guide book or looking up the relevant information online.
3. Students will then find the list of cities on a world map. When they go from city to city in a certain order they gain a set of directions. This will be the answer to a directional lock in the room.

Works Cited

"Blueprint For Crafting Your First Escape Room." LockPaperScissors. https://lockpaperscissors.co/craft-1st-escape-room. Accessed August 18, 2018.

Dennis, Donald, and Frey, Stephanie. "Escape Room Game Series." Inverse Genius. February 22, 2018. http://www.inversegenius.com/gsl-blog/2018/2/22/escape-room-game-series.

Elumir, Errol. "13 Rules for Escape Room Puzzle Design." The Codex. August 15, 2018. https://thecodex.ca/13-rules-for-escape-room-puzzle-design/.

"Getting Started." BreakoutEDU. https://www.breakoutedu.com/welcome. Accessed August 18, 2018.

Pedersen, Fred . "101 Best Escape Room Puzzle Ideas." Nowescape. March 18, 2016. http://blog.nowescape.com/101-best-puzzle-ideas-for-escape-rooms/.