Educational ELA escape rooms are the ones that focus on content and skills as much as they do locks and keys.
Escape rooms have built up a lot of hype over the course of the last decade or so, and their educational use has exploded.
We see people designing escape rooms left and right and claiming that they are intended for educational use.
This begs the question…How are escape rooms educational?
There will, of course, always be that group of people who say that games and problem-solving opportunities of all types are educational in their own right, and that may be true. However, there is a time and place for escape rooms, and not all ELA escape rooms help students actually learn content.
So what makes for a good educational ELA escape room?
The Non-Example
I was once a part of an in-person escape room where we were given a packet of materials and a lockbox and were instructed to try to escape by getting to the information inside the box.
This escape room was fun and frustrating and required the group to work together, but in the grand scheme of the escape room, I could not actually provide any information about the content I had looked at or any of the data I shifted through as I searched for the codes.
What went wrong?
The fact of the matter is that the information itself was not tied to the codes. The code was found within the content, but it was not dependent on knowing it. Once I figured out the code, the content didn’t matter.
In one particular scenario, the code was created by the first letters of the capitalized words in the document. Once I noticed the capitalized letters, I didn’t read any of the content. I noticed that the words were capitalized right away, and I quickly guessed the code by skimming through the document and highlighting just the capitalized words.
Content-Driven, Educational ELA Escape Rooms
ELA escape rooms (or any escape room for that matter) that separate the content from the code do not serve students in the same way that educational ELA escape rooms depend on the content to figure out the code.
For example, in this ELA Test Prep Escape Room, students have to be able to read a passage (very similar to the type of passage that they encounter in ELA standardized tests) and answer questions. Their answers to those questions create the code.
In this situation, the code is directly tied to the content. Students HAVE to do the task to escape the room.
To find the answer to the second ‘lock,’ students have to make predictions about a character’s choices based on their actions within the reading and then use the symbols next to those predictions to change the symbols into letters which in turn are the key to unlock the next ‘door.’
Each of these specific task examples requires students to not only think critically, problem-solve, and possibly work with a group but also require the students to read the information closely enough to answer questions about it, analyze it, and make predictions.
When you are looking for educational escape rooms, really look through what you want students to work on, and make sure the escape room is challenging them both with content and with the ‘locks’ themselves.
A good educational escape room is focused on classroom content, and learning that presents students with a mental challenge and focuses on the skills that your students specifically need to practice.
As you begin to “Plan Your Curriculum Like a Boss,” consider how the activities you’re adding support the learning and standards within your classroom, and find some great, educational ELA escape rooms that align with your goals.
If you’re interested and you want to see a full list of my Educational ELA Escape Rooms, click here!
