🕹 Let's make learning a game

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💡THE BIG IDEA💡

Engaging students with digital escape rooms

In our Ditch Summit session, DTT blog/social media editor Karly Moura and I shared the best teacher resources from Ditch That Textbook.

The summit might be over. But the resources we shared in that session never go away. You can use them any time!

So … for the next 8 weeks, we will do deep dives into each of the eight resources we shared in that session.

First up: Digital escape rooms.

What it is: A digital escape room is a type of online game. It’s typically a digital version of a physical escape room, where participants are “trapped” in the room. They must solve puzzles and riddles to escape the room (or complete a specific task).

How to play them: Digital escape rooms can be played independently, in pairs, or in groups making them ideal for the classroom or professional development session.

How to access them: You can usually run them on any device with internet access, making them a perfect option for remote team-building activities or events.

Escape rooms are not only fun and engaging, but they also promote critical thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, and creativity skills.

Here are the basic steps to create an escape room:

1. 💡 Create a theme for your escape room. This is the story behind your escape room — and it’ll help you design questions and details inside it. It includes the story, the characters, the plot, etc.

2. 🔒 Create some locks. An escape room is based on escaping the room! The locks contain secret words, codes, etc. to unlock the digital locks. Participants find the words/codes through clues in the escape room.

3. 🚪 Create your room. Lots of people create escape rooms in simple websites (like Google Sites), slide decks (like Google Slides), or even platforms like Genially. They’re made up of text and images with clues and story. The locks you use to escape are often a Google Form (with data validation).

4. ➡️ Share it with students and play! This is the best part! You should probably test your escape room before you play it with students, though.

We have lots of ways to start using digital escape rooms in your class.

Here are our best escape room resources …

• More than 40 free digital escape rooms on our digital escape rooms page.

• Step-by-step instructions to make digital escape rooms

• Enroll in our online course: Getting Started with Digital Escape Rooms.

• Check out our newly updated Digital Escape Rooms Wakelet collection where you can find ALL of the resources above plus even more. (You can also get our Wakelet collections sent straight to your inbox by clicking on the subscribe button next to our name!)

💻 TECH TIP

Create your own Lego minifigure with Microsoft Designer

Microsoft Designer Image Creator is a fun tool to create images just by describing them with text. (And it’s free!)

One really cool feature: You can create and share the prompts you use to generate images with it.

Lots of educators on social media have been sharing some pretty creative ones!

This prompt, shared by Mark Anderson, can be used to make your own Lego “minifig.”

• Open this link to go to the prompt. 

• Fill in the blanks and generate the image.

• Click “edit the entire prompt” to adapt the prompt even more.

• Download the image and make adjustments in a design app like Canva or Adobe Express.

Sometimes AI image generators don’t generate text well so you might need to edit text like I did in the book above.

Create your own Lego Minifigure with this prompt.

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!