If you’ve been on social media at all in the last 2+ years, you may have seen some of your friends participating in a social event called Escape Rooms. They are popping up everywhere. If you are unaware what they are, this is how it works. You and your team members are put in a room and you must work together to find clues to solve a variety of challenging puzzles within the room in order to “escape” the room. Sounds like fun right? Now imagine bringing this educational game into your classroom.
Escape Rooms in the Classroom
Escape Rooms are fun for adults and they can be a fun educational game for students too! In the last year, these escape rooms have found their way into our classrooms and have turned learning up a level. These digital escape rooms, as they are called, are not only educational but they are fun, engaging, and highly beneficial to our young students’ ever-growing minds. By including digital escape rooms in your classrooms, your students are forced to think in a way they are not used to doing in school. Plus, it helps bring something new to the classroom to boost motivation (teacher bonus!).
Why “Escape” the classroom?
Digital escape rooms provide a life-like experience for your students. They bring together the concepts of learning and fun. Below I have listed some ways the use of digital escape rooms are an excellent tool for learning!
Escape Rooms are engaging
No matter what grade you teach, it’s a well known fact that students love playing games. The bonus for the teacher is simple: playing games helps you learn without actually putting in a lot of effort. Educational games utilize your whole brain when actively playing. Games that engage students through the use of visuals, audio, and good story-telling helps students retain information much longer.
Escape Rooms promote mastery
Another big perk to escape rooms is the mastery of concepts students can obtain. Through the use of games, students can practice specific skills repeatedly. By doing this over and over, they are able to quickly ‘master’ whichever content you wish for them to know.
Escape Rooms come with rewards
Everyone likes a good reward for doing something right, but often times once we have gotten a reward we stop trying. Escape Rooms work in a way that you need to keep getting rewards to get the ultimate price: “freedom.” The reward for digital escape rooms becomes being able to successfully take clues to solve puzzles in order to ‘escape’. They must be challenging enough to keep students thinking and working. If the rewards are challenging enough, students will keep pushing forward in order to ‘escape.’
Students get to play
We are taught to learn through the idea of play from a very young age. We are taught survival skills as well. When students are able to ‘play’ with their peers and truly collaborate, they are being taught not only the content you want them to know, but how to work together towards a common goal, how to communicate more effectively, and how to delegate roles within the group so all members are successful.
Escape Rooms are online!
Today’s youth are born knowing how to operate in the digital world. Their learning environment is much different than what most of us grew up in. Technology is engaging. Students today are more likely to get excited about a project like digital escape rooms when there are videos to watch, audio to listen to, and a virtual reality setting on the screen that mimic real life. In addition to this being a high interest concept for students, it also means less of a mess for you.
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Digital Escape Room, Escape The Snowsuit, Figurative Language, and More!$7.99 -
Digital Escape Room, the Outsiders, Do It for Johnny!$7.99
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Digital Escape Room, Snow Day, Literary Terms and Figurative Language Escape$8.50
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Digital Escape Room, the Tell-tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe Escape by the Morning$8.50
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Digital Escape Room, the Monkey’s Paw, W.w. Jacobs, Escape the Three Wishes!$8.50
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Digital Escape Room, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Escape the Woods$8.50
Finding Digital Escape Rooms
Digital Escape Rooms are available to purchase and can be used over and over again! Whether you are looking for some figurative language fun, holiday fun (Christmas and Halloween), or something that pairs well with a novel like The Outsiders, there is something for you!
There are so many benefits to games in the classroom. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find games that really grab your students’ attention especially at the secondary level. Escape Rooms are a game changer for education games in the classroom. If you haven’t tried digital escape rooms, or have been hesitant because you didn’t see the educational value in them, I highly suggest you try them out. You will be happy with the results and your students will love them as well!
One Comment
I purchased the A Christmas Carol escape room from Teacher pay Teachers. I cannot get it to work on our schools chromebooks because of the domain that it was created in?? (Words from our tech guy…lol) If I give you his email information can you email him and see if the two of you together can figure out how we can make it work?? Otherwise I’m going to have to see about getting my money back which I don’t want…this is an AMAZING fun game!!!!
matthew.scharein@shirley.k12.ar.us