Escape Room stamped on paper with a magnifying glass enhancing it.Escape Rooms can be a fun and exciting way to help your students explore a topic in a more engaging way than traditional methods.  Escape Rooms started as a form of entertainment in which you were literally locked in a room with your friends and you had to find the key or code to escape through a series of puzzles.

These have since been adopted by educators as a way of teaching students a new subject or reviewing before an exam. The point of most escape rooms is to literally escape from a locked room, but you can adapt the goal to meet your objectives. The goal can be to recover an artifact or to solve a mystery. These escape rooms can be done in person or as online games. Virtual escape rooms allow students who can’t be present in the classroom to take part as well. They could also be used in courses that are online or asynchronous.

Learning Outcomes

What are your outcomes? Are there certain concepts you want the students to grasp in order to move forward? Make those absolutely necessary to the solving of a clue.  If you are having teams work through these puzzles together, then this gives a perfect opportunity for peer instruction as they help each other work through the concept together.

Virtual or In-Person

There are advantages and disadvantages to either of these options.  In-person can be a fun and hands-on way to create your escape room, but it can require some props like programmable locks, UV Pens,  and puzzle boxes.  Virtual options can be done from outside the classroom but take a little more effort to be as engaging.

Door cracked with light coming through.Theme

Choose a theme that is fun and fits your subject. The theme will guide you into the story that unfolds throughout your escape room.  A good narrative can make or break an escape room.  It doesn’t have to be incredibly verbose, but it is important that the students are invested in the story beyond simply finding the answers to the puzzles.  The more fun they have the more likely they are to remember what they learned.

Putting it all together

There are lots of ways you can put together your Escape Rooms.  You can do something as complex as coding your own webpage or as simple as using Google Forms or OneNote.

Google Forms Template

Putting together these escape rooms is really a lot of fun. You can jump in and try it yourself with our template for an escape room in Google forms with 5 challenges! Clicking the link will take you to Google Forms and prompt you to copy the form.

Buttons from top to bottom in Google Forms editing: Add Question, Import Questions, Add Title and Description, Add Image, Add Video, Add Section

Back to Old Main

If you’d like to see one of our favorite examples we created an escape room in honor of the 150-year anniversary of the founding of the university.  We chose a theme of time travel as a way of showing the different time periods when the University of Arkansas was active. Our main room was created as an HTML page with additional pieces added using H5P for extra interactivity. Trying any of these rooms can really be inspiring to create something new and exciting for your course so we highly recommend checking them out!

Virtual Escape Rooms to Try

 

Links to Help You Create your Escape Rooms

These are some of the many amazing resources that we’ve collected to help you create an escape room of your own. Warning: these pages are filled with really cool tools that are bound to pull you in and have you thinking of so many ways to integrate them into activities!