Overview of the Escape Room Project: If you're looking for a fun, challenging, and valid culminating project for virtually any course, then an escape room style experience is a great option to consider. Such a project would involve designing an escape experience where the various elements within the escape room would require a firm knowledge of the units in a course. For example, in my Grade 12 economics course, I make sure that there is at least five elements made for each escape room: one element for each of our units. I do the exact same thing in Grade 12 Law. This is a great project for students to either work on by themselves, in partners, or even in small groups. Either way, students are challenged to both design and produce an escape room style experience. Teachers can change the requirements for each student depending on the size of the groups that they'll allow. For example, you could require that each student designs a certain number of elements themselves, and work cooperatively on a another prescribed number of elements. I tend to make my escape room worth 10% of the overall course grade, while also having an exam that is worth 20%. However, teachers could certainly adjust that weighting to suit their course and the size of their escape room project. Advantages of the Project: The escape room project has a lot of appealing features, including the fact that: i) it forces students to dig into material from the course in order to design elements of the escape room. Obviously, this serves as great review. ii) it requires students to know material from the course in order to design or play the escape room. (It's not one of those culminating projects that anyone could do without actually knowing anything about the course material.) iii) it activates imagination, creativity, problem-solving, and collaboration. All highly valued goals in education, today. The Caveat: You should make it clear to your students that you want to make sure that the elements of an escape room project do involve some creativity. In other words, you don't want to see a bunch of multiple choice quizzes where the correct answers produce the correct combination of a lock. The Rubric: This project fits very nicely into the streamlined Global Studies Achievement Chart that I've made available in a previous post. However, if you would like to download a PDF rubric specifically developed for this project, you can do so from the link at the bottom of this article. General Tips and Tricks for Making a Fun Escape Experience! Here are a few general pieces of advice that I tend to give my students as they embark on this project.
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The quality of our writing, especially in professional contexts, is actually quite important. The fact is, whenever we write, we always reveal two things about ourselves. Naturally, we communicate the explicit message that we are intending to write, but we also convey an implicit message: the story revealed by our writing ability.
Truth be told, writing ability is invariably associated with a host of other traits, such as one’s ability to think, to learn, and to communicate. Our ability to write, at any given age, reveals how much effort we have directed towards mastering our language up to that point in time. Poor writing reveals either a poor effort in learning one's language, or a poor effort in applying one’s ability toward a particular piece of writing. Either way, poor writing does not speak well of a person’s ability or attitude. In poker terms, we could say that a person’s writing is a “tell.” Writing reveals something about ourselves that we may not intend, or even wish, to convey. Indeed, a writer’s skill will often belie their words. As uncomfortable as it may be to believe, we always stand to undermine even our best efforts if the quality of our writing indicates that we are perhaps less capable, less intelligent, or less responsible than our words might suggest. |
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