Tools
It is no “one way” of making an escape-room/box, it depends on the course, the resources, time, etc. So it is difficult to give clear instructions on how to go through with it, but here are some suggestions on how you could structure the working process.
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- Start with the learning outcomes of the course: these should give you the “theme” to follow with when creating puzzles. For example, when we built an escape-room for a paleoecology course at UiB, the obvious theme was “paleoecology”, but the learning outcomes gave us quickly some focus points.
It is not easy to make a puzzle where the students need to “plan and carry out a small palaeoecological study” (marked in blue), that’s a learning outcome that takes a long time and probably needs to be done in a more systematic way. But it is easier to make puzzles where they come across expressions or gets to know different methods in paleoecology (marked in yellow), so this is something we can work with. - Identify what type of puzzle you want to make, and work backwards: a common puzzle is the “open this lock”-type of puzzle. The participants need to find a number combination that goes into a lock; when opened, they can get another puzzle, a hint, part of the final solution or something similar. When you have found out what type of puzzle you want to make, e.g., a 4-digit lock, then “working backwards” means you know now that you need to hide a number combination somewhere to be found, so its just to be creative! For the paleoecology course, we wanted the students to look at different methods for data collections, and we wanted one puzzle to be to open a 4-digit lock. One method to collect data in paleoecology is to use a Russian peat borer and count sediment rings (thus collecting traces of e.g. pollen back in time). By creating models of these dirt sediments, we suddenly have something the students can count – and then put into the lock to open it and come closer to the end goal.
- Putting together the puzzle in a story: we want the students to have a common goal as a group; in an escape-room, this goal is natural “to escape”, but escape what? To make a story is not necessarily easy, but don’t put too much time into this, the story can be weird, or a bit stupid or unlikely, the important part is that you give the students a reason to solve the set of puzzles. In our paleoecology course, the story was that a “mad professor” had trapped them inside a lab, and they had 60 minutes to open a box where the “safe button” was hidden before all the oxygen in the room would go out. A bit over dramatic, and possibly stupid, but it worked!
- Start with the learning outcomes of the course: these should give you the “theme” to follow with when creating puzzles. For example, when we built an escape-room for a paleoecology course at UiB, the obvious theme was “paleoecology”, but the learning outcomes gave us quickly some focus points.