Digital Escape Room: Using Google Forms

Digital Escape Room: A Fun Formative Assessment

Escape rooms have become an increasingly popular activity and for good reason too.  They are fun, exciting, challenging, and can test your mental strength.  This concept translates extremely well for our 21st Century Classroom.  Design a digital escape room activity for our students can hits on the four Cs of our modern learners.  In order for students to be successful in completing their mission, the activity should promote collaboration as students work together to solve the clues which unlock the digital mystery it promotes communication among each other.  The clues should also be challenging and promote critical thinking skills as they work to find the key to unlock the answer.  Lastly when done correctly the escape room should also promote creativity, to think outside the box and to promote an engaging and immersive learning experience.  The digital escape room can be a great way for students to demonstrate their understanding of class content and can be a fun formative assessment tool for your classroom. 



Building Your Breakout: The Story

When designing your breakout or digital escape room it is important to start with your story.  The story should be a way to hook your students in the mystery they are about to uncover.  You can have them be police officers trying to solve a crime, or spies trying to gather intel and report back what they discovered, the scenario is up to you.  I try to make the scenario relate to my content but at the same time being creative and engaging.  When building your story you want to pick a series of themes to focus your mystery around.  The recommendations of themes are somewhere between 4-6.  These themes will end up being the locks to your escape room doors and the clues that you will design will be based on solving the questions/ locks for the themes of your escape room.  Depending on how long you want your students to spend on solving the escape room will determine how many themes and how intense your clues should be.  On average unlocking the digital locks should be around 10 mins.  If they are designed to be too difficult it might lead to student fatigue or disinterest.  It is a careful balance between critical thinking challenging questions, with the excitement of unlocking and progressing through the activity.  

Clueless about Clue Design:  Creating the Clues for your activity

The clues drives your activity and push your students to solve the mystery that you have designed.  The clues can be as challenging as you want them to be.  When developing your clues keep in mind about how long you want them to spend on each of the keys that you are creating for your
breakout/escape room.  Clues can ask students to look at specific information or to input a specific date.  There are several resources that you can use to help you design sets of clues for you to use for your activity.  Using the links below will bring you to a list of resources that can be helpful when developing your own unique set of clues.  


Escape! Google Form Escape Room

Now that you have your story in place and clues created for the students to work through, the final step is to create your actual escape room.  This can be done easily using Google Forms.  Using Google forms you can create a simple escape room scenario for your students.  Simply combing a short answer response question and response validation will create the desired effect of a lock.  Each one of your questions on your Google Form will act as a "Lock" which the students will need to solve using the clues that you designed for the activity. These clues can direct students to utilize information that they learned throughout the lesson.  By solving the clues and unlocking the mystery that you designed, not only  creates a fun and engaging lesson but  also creates a unique way to formatively assess student knowledge.
     

Additional Resources:

There are a lot of great resources available to those who want to experiment with the fun and exciting journey of Digital Escape Room activities.  One the leading companies in the education market of this type of activity is BreakoutEDU.  They have be designed kits which can be purchased and already created activities for those who want to try it without having to build one from scratch.  

Video:  Steps of creating a BreakoutEdu escape room. 



Comments

  1. Rod CarnillMarch 18, 2019 at 1:17 PM

    Breakouts and Google Forms are a great pairing of tools to make learners think and to apply their skills and abilities. Building the escape rooms or breakouts is a bit of an undertaking but also a good chance for a group of teachers to practice the four C's!

    ReplyDelete

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