ESCAPE ROOMS in the classroom
Rationale
An Escape Room is an activity in which a group of people (between 5-7) begins a story getting inside a room. Players work to solve clues and puzzles, moving from activity to activity in search of answers until they discover the end of the story and find a way to escape the room.
Escape rooms have been around for ages, but recently they have jumped into schools.
It’s not difficult to see why this would engage students: Any classroom material can turned out into an exciting and mysterious journey around the classroom and students will be on their feet running, arguing, puzzling and caring.
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To know more, read some of the reasons to use Escape Rooms in the classroom (In Spanish) (In English)
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The story
This escape room is very simple. It is my first attempt to design an escape room as a practical activity in a teacher training course about Multiple Intelligences.
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The time and resources to prepare it were scarce and the story was given by the teacher trainer beforehand, so that every participating teacher created a different kind of activity to tell this story to their students. A participant in the course prepared the story in drawings, some of them by means of dramatization, another one made an advertisement, etc..
In my case, I decided to create a simple escape room in which the students have to find the clues in each challenge to find out by themselves the complete story of the two men and, reaching the final moral and the correct key from a keyring, escape the room.
Not all the answers to the different challenges are included here, as they were specific contents we had already dealt with during this course on Multiple Intelligences, and the teams´ answers to every challenge were checked by the course trainer and by me before they went on to the next challenge.
Although the details of the story were shown to players in the class presentation in order as they accomplished each challenge, If I had to do this escape room again, after this experimental try, I would provide the teams with five boxes (one per each challenge) containing both, the correct answers for them to check theirs, and the next challenge to accomplish.
The complete story about the "Two men story" is in the presentation in the same order they have to find them ("For Teachers" heading)
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I am looking forward to designing more Escape rooms because... Teachers in the "Multiple intelligences" course had a great time playing this one and got enthusiastically involved in the challenges which transformed the classroom into an adventure!!
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Please, be indulgent with this escape room. You will find very simple quizzes and activities in it. May some of them give you ideas to create your own escape room!!
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Finally, to keep on researching about escape rooms, I have created a Symbaloo where I am uploading all the links with useful information and resources about Escape Rooms: Symbaloo Escape Rooms
Contacto
Pilar Torres Caño
IES Ángel de Saavedra
Córdoba, España
