Building an Escape Room from Scratch: Where to Start
As I mentioned, I love escape rooms. That picture is the day my daughter escaped from the womb. She’s 6 now and she started going to escape rooms with me when she was old enough to sit up. I used to try to incorporate them whenever I could into my classes. I would use the virtual escape rooms, buy hands-on tasks from TpT, and even purchase kits to use within my classroom whenever I could. I would spend countless hours trying to meld them with my curriculum and find different ways to make the puzzles work with my classroom. All just to have the one classroom period run too long and have to find time for the kids to try to fit it in another day or give them too many hints because what I thought was easy to understand was actually way too complicated. And don’t get me started on how many times I have set a silly little lock wrong. That seems to be a yearly tradition. But year after year, I found myself still trying to make it work.
Then as escape rooms got more and more common the classroom kits started to become popular. My school was able to acquire several kits (Breakout EDU) and I began working with my classes to build classroom experiences with them. If you have never tried these boxes, I will sidebar for a minute to say a couple of things.
- These kits are an affordable way to dip your toes in the escape room frontier if you are not able to or don’t want to commit to a full model like I am going to walk you through. They come with several different types of locks, a hasp, a black light pen, among a couple of other little things.
- You can purchase their access bank of puzzles which are already created. This is nice because they are already done for you and sorted by topic.
- The locks are not the greatest and some of the puzzles are hard to follow. I have had a ton of trouble with the resettable locks over the years and the company is not overly willing to work with you to fix any broken ones. Which I guess is understandable since technically we did break them, but at the same time…the lock wasn’t the greatest…soooo yeah. Anyway, it’s an okay starting point if you want to slow roll your way into the escape game world. But who wants to do that? Let’s go big or go home.
So where should you start? Well the first week I spent online gaming with the kids. I know that may sound like a lot, but it isn’t. Sometimes it even runs over. I like to do this in a very particular way. I project the game up on my board and have one person be the “game master.” This means that they will be the one in control of the computer. They still have to listen to the class, but they are doing all the clicking. I usually model being the “game master” for the first game and then relinquish the role to a new student for each game after that. This gives them the ability to start working as a team right away. It also helps them to begin listening to each other, which is a near impossible feat for middle schoolers.
Here are some general follow up questions I like to ask after each game:
- What puzzles did you like? Why?
- What puzzle was your least favorite? Why?
- Was there anything that was particularly difficult? Was there something you would have changed about it to make it easier?
- What age group do you think this game could be played by?
- How well did your team work together?
- How did the puzzles connect together?
- Did you have to complete them all in order to finish the game or could you have skipped something?
The more you talk about this stuff now, the easier it will be later on when you have to break apart your puzzle plans. Take your time and play some games. Let the kids get excited about the project to come. Just relax and bond as a group. It may not seem crucial, but it’s an important step.
I have a few sites that I like to consistently use every year and then from there it varies. My absolute favorite site is called Neutral Room Escape Games. They used to have a lot of games available, but the whole Flash debacle happened and now they are somewhat limited. But I promise you that every game on there is worth experiencing. Have the class solve a room and debrief after every one. It’s at this point I like to introduce an “idea notebook.” Have a recorder start to list different puzzle ideas that the class likes as you start talking in your debriefs. For example, we liked the idea of how we didn’t know which way to hold the triangle to get the correct number (89 or 68), but the picture helped us figure out the position. It’s important to have a notebook because you will have so many ideas on this journey and you will want to be able to recall them all easily when the time is right. Another site I really like to use is 365 Escape. It’s much more simplistic than Neutral’s version, but it has a lot of ideas that are easy to recreate and build good discussion points.
There are a lot of amazing options out there. I would not recommend paying for anything. There is just too much that is free that you can work with to fork out any money just yet. So even though some may seem interesting or tempting, DON’T DO IT! Save your money. I am sure you will spend some as the year progresses. Don’t we always? For now, just get your game on!