Loving Math in Elementary School: Creating your Own Digital Escape Rooms for the Classroom

An escape room is an adventure in which players solve a series of puzzles using clues, hints, and strategies to complete the objectives at hand.

Digital escape rooms, as the name suggest, are completed online, and require no printing, cutting, laminating, or setting up. All a teacher needs to do is give the link to the students and let them explore and struggle a bit to complete all the challenges.

I like to keep my digital escape rooms to about 4 challenges for a maximum time of 60-90 minutes. I have tested mine in different classrooms and find that this is a good time frame for students to work through. Believe it or not, the time goes by so quickly that it seems like only 15 minutes have passed.

Here is how I plan my escape rooms:

1) Decide on the skill or standard you want your students to review. This could be a specific math or reading skill, a chapter review, or the review for a quarterly assessment.

2) Decide how many challenges you want to include: This is important as you don't want the students to finish too quickly or spend hours on a challenge. 60 minutes is optimal.

3) Decide on a theme or story line. Escape rooms have a story behind and includes the student as part of the story. Something like "a team of aliens have invaded earth and captured you. In order to escape you must complete each challenge." This sets the stage and gives you a canvas for your creative process. Think about adding pictures or scenes of aliens

4) Design each challenge by using a variety of sources: I host my escape room in a google site and include a variety of outside links such as puzzles, videos, google slides, hidden pictures, google forms, google drawings, etc.

5) Decide on different digital locks: You can pick word, color, directional, or number locks. All digital embedded in a google form.

6) Embed your forms and lock box right into your site: Embed your lock box right into the site you are using and publish your site.