Escape Room
I was challenged to create an Escape Room activity with my flipped classroom in my Interpersonal Communication course (COM110). What a challenge! I did not know where to begin. I found a few web-resources, and I thought I would share them with you, dear reader. I imagined a group of students locked in the classroom, where the only exit was a key, hiding in the answers of various puzzles. It sounds like the start of a horror movie, but for my students it could be a fun activity over the chapter. I looked at a few Escape Rooms for a general sense of the design. The rooms aren’t just conveyor belts of puzzles. They’re also stories, with plots and characters, either portrayed by recorded voices and movies or by live actors. As this is my first Escape Room, I wouldn’t be hiring any actors. Save that for next time.
First, the creators of the first Escape Room recommend starting with a story and characters. I decided to create a story from the components of the textbook for the Interpersonal Communication textbook, focusing on Chapter Two. I started with two people, Alex and Taylor. The met online. They found each other "funny", "attractive" and "warm", with similar interests and same values. They decide to go on a first date. Simple. They go to dinner at The COM, a new restaurant in Glendale. When people meet they often use the social penetration theoretical stages to get to know each other. They explore the other person with self-disclosure, questions, probing the other’s thoughts and feelings.
Secondly, you need to create topics for which you build the puzzles. When you have chosen the topics, then you can create your puzzles. A first date for Alex and Taylor allowed for the following topics or key subjects I wanted the students to explore: attraction, self-awareness, self-concept, self-esteem, self-disclosure, secrets, gender, masks, and social penetration.
Third is creating the smaller puzzles around the story. I used the following websites to help create individual puzzles for each topic/subject.
1 http://www.customreceipt.com/
2 http://www.fakereceipt.us/sales_receipt.php
3. https://cryptii.com/pipes/caesar-cipher
4. https://www.dcode.fr/caesar-cipher
5. https://md5decrypt.net/en/Caesar/
https://crosswordhobbyist.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIionHqIa-5wIVhNlkCh2pdAYDEAAYAiAAEgIXwfD_BwE
For the small puzzles, think about ciphers and codes. This helped reinforce the "encoding-decoding" of messages, as explained in the basic communication transactional model.
You can make a whole sentence or word out of the capital letters from the random text or the first lines of the poem.
Decrypting can also be simply hiding the helping messages inside the ordinary text, by highlighting them, using a different font, etc.
You can also use hieroglyphics, so players will have to use some imagination.
Using numbers instead of letters (or the other way around) is another great way to create a code for deciphering.
You can break the code into pieces and write them on the images you have in the room, so to reveal the desired numbers they will need to work extra hard.
The next step is to mix some activities with the puzzles. Here I created two physical challenges.
I created a riddle that required the group to assemble a word-salad. I placed the gaming puzzle obviously in the center of the classroom. We never had the word-salad puzzle sitting there before, so students asked, "What is that?" Eventually, when a team finished a puzzle, I pointed to the word-salad for them to try to assemble. The clues appeared only after the word-salad puzzle assembly was completed. All of the activities must aid in the progression of the story and teach the students the most important content for the course.
One hint I would suggest in your planning is to create puzzles that require at least two students. The most important thing here — at least two. This will make a puzzle more complicated and will help to build a proper team work. For instance, have two recordings. I had Alex's thoughts on recording one, and Taylor's thoughts on recording two. Each recording was housed in the student's Canvas module. The team needed to play an audio recording, and listen to in Canvas. Alex's recording offered hints partially about what s/he attracted him/her to Taylor. So the students had to listen to the record to catch the hints, but the hints were on different recordings. The teams needed to work together.
At the end of the Escape Room we had awards. The students who completed the puzzles first as a team were able to select from a variety of GCC memorabilia which I purchased to give them pride in their college. They reported very positive feedback.
BTW: I am refining the Escape Room so ALL of your suggestions will be very helpful in the revision. Please comment.
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