Escape Room Part II: Locks and Keys

With the end of our Quahog Cup Challenge for 2020, I wanted to take the time to recap and share what I learned. First I need to give credit to Amanda Jones, an inspiring and creative librarian from Louisiana who with her teaching colleague, Heather White, produced an excellent online learning experience about Google Forms and Digital Escape Rooms. As I said earlier, I have done digital escape rooms in Google Forms specific to nonfiction articles in which I wanted students to practice close reading. This one was going to be a bit different. Amanda Jones's webinar was an excellent refresher course for me and reminded me of some fun tricks and tips when creating the game. I would recommend their Our Two Cents Webinars as very practical and immediately useful in your daily teaching practices, both on campus and remotely. 

Just to remind readers of the previous post, students were given a list of twenty-five books that were selected by the 6th-grade team and me, the librarian. They were asked to read a minimum of ten books and to record book reviews on Flipgrid during the course of the school year. The Escape Room, based on the booklist,  combined puzzles, codes, images, and maps as the students were guided through the Locks and Keys to arrive at their final destination. In the end, teams were asked to create their own Lock and Key based on one of the books they had read. Some were very creative incorporating keys written in Morse Code! 

You are probably wondering what all of this has to do with the purpose of this blog. I believe it is an ideal example of the inquiry process. My driving question was "How do I create a virtual escape room?" Once I had my question, I sought out resources that would help with the design of the game. I had to identify all of the moving parts and components that would be needed to make the game interesting, as well as challenging for the students who read all twenty-five books. The Escape Room could not be so difficult that students would be unable to finish in the allotted time. I needed to think through each lock and key determining images or codes that would work best to find a solution and incorporate critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication into the elements of the game. 

After hours of pre-planning, I assembled the final product and ran the game with other 6th-grade team members to make sure it was just right. Finally, it was made public to an authentic audience of 6th graders. Once the challenge was finished I received feedback from teachers and students who monitored or played the game. This post is my reflection step of the inquiry process.  Most of the teams worked collaboratively and used their knowledge of the books or critical thinking skills to solve the puzzles. Some teams, however, especially those with members who had read all of the books, moved through the locks and keys much too quickly.  

Again, with a limited amount of time I wanted each team to be able to finish. I would like to work on the complexity of the solutions for next time though to make certain that the "avid" readers find the challenge, well a bit more challenging. This was the perfect inquiry in practice for me and it leads me to the idea that while teaching and learning remotely can be difficult at times, inquiry practice is ideally suited for teaching our students in a distance learning environment, just as it was for me. I was highly engaged in learning all I could about Digital Escape Rooms because I knew I had to produce something authentic for an audience that would be clamoring for an Escape Room Challenge to drop at 10:30 on Thursday morning. Starting with a question and having the flexibility and freedom to find the answers as well as produce something meaningful is still the way I learn best. I'll just bet it is for our students too!