Google apps are useful and Google Classroom has made teaching in a digital environment wonderfully easy. There is a downside though. Teachers are confident with Docs and Slides and too often happy to run their entire programmes in just these two apps. Teachers teach with Slides and ask students to produce work in Slides and high school students can spend their whole school day using Slides just as they used to use paper. (It’s the same with Powerpoint in Microsoft environments too)

Time to be more Creative!

Looking for ways to expand the educational experience, I came across a number of approaches to producing interactive digital Escape Rooms.
The two common versions of this are:

1. Use the sections of a Google Form to control a narrative based on the multi-choice answers that direct to different sections when selected by the escapees.
2. Use a Google Site to embed multiple tasks and challenges onto one page and then use an embedded Google Form to validate all their secret codes collected from the tasks before it allows the form to be submitted.

This 2nd approach seemed like a perfect way to encourage creative use of multiple Google Apps, so here’s a quick guide and a video summary of how it’s done.

TIPS:

1. You can combine online puzzles and challenges with real world ones in the classroom with all the codes needed to be entered into the form to escape:
2. The Google Form timestamps the players when they finally submit the form
3. Adding a countdown timer on a screen can add tension
4. Checkout the Breakout Edu site for ideas on puzzles and games to solve for codes.
5. You can even code puzzles in Scratch and embed them giving you creative possibilities.
6.  Watch the 2 videos below for setup and puzzle ideas.

Digital Escape room explained [Video]

Ideas for Puzzles you can embed in the Escape room:

Here’s a full example Escape room:
https://sites.google.com/orewacollege.nz/emoji-escape-room/home