Escape Room: A fun, challenging, and valid culminating assessment

Art Lightstone

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. 

1. Consider making a mock bulletin board!

You would be surprised how many fun and useful hints, cyphers, codes, maps, diagrams etc. you can fit onto a mock bulletin board.

You can make this bulletin board as a great big picture ahead of time. (You could even make it on your computer using a service like Canva or Lucidpress). It doesn’t have to be a real bulletin board. In fact, a solid picture makes it difficult for players to mess your board up!

2. Never be afraid to use a cypher to translate random things into a number.

Sometimes we struggle with how to convert a name, place, date, colour, law, theory, etc. into a number.

Never be afraid to simply create some sort of cypher that will translate an idea into either a number or a letter. (Depending on your lock.)You could either make an obvious cypher or a more subtle cypher that is disguised as something else. (For example, the scroll to the left could be translated into all kinds of codes based on knowledge of these theories.)

3. Try to segment the elements of your escape experience.

Sometimes we make an escape experience that is unnecessarily confusing and frustrating by giving players access to ALL of the elements at once. Thus, a player might decode a combination of a lock, but not know which one. If the player has access to ten locks, then they’ll have to waste time trying a combination on all of the locks before moving on.
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Try to isolate each element so that a player can only work on one element at a time.

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