Adding Escape Rooms to Your Online Course

A virtual version of the escape room concept is engaging students at Northampton Community College. Here's how the setup works.

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 02/05/20

While escape games have found use in face-to-face classes, particularly with escape boxes in K-12, an online instructor in a Pennsylvania community college has figured out how to use the concepts for her online courses. Beth Ritter-Guth, associate dean of Online Learning & Educational Technology at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, PA, shared her approach during a session at OLC's Accelerate conference.

The escape box is a portable (and some would say, safer) version of the escape room concept. People work in teams on a timer to figure out clues that will enable them to hunt down keys in the space, open a series of locks and solve a mystery. In the school environment, innovative teachers have applied the gaming approach of offering clues and forcing students to figure out the answers to reinforce lesson content and boost engagement. Breakoutedu.com sells the complete boxes for $150 primarily into the K-12 market. Those include the physical components (such as the box itself and the locks) and access to some 1,500 games. Ritter-Guth has used that for faculty development in her college to give instructors a taste of what's possible.

In the past, enabling online students to do the same in their virtual classrooms hasn't been simple to accomplish. It required programming knowledge to set up the various scenarios and make them available online. However, according to Ritter-Guth, new — and free — tools have surfaced that now allow for the easy creation of games, simulations and experiences that can make the students' learning experiences pop. Students answer specific questions or solve specific mysteries to open digital versions of locks.

Now, Ritter-Guth has students work in teams or singly to set up their own escape box experiences for others to tackle. For a course she recently taught on American Realism, for example, she used four escape experiences: two she developed, and two others where students created them.

How to Create Your Escape Game

Ritter-Guth offered a quick rundown on how to approach the work of setting up an escape game.

1) Start with a plan based on what your goals are as an instructor or instructional designer. Then figure out a theme for the exercise. Sometimes the theme matches the lesson content; sometimes it doesn't. For instance, Ritter-Guth has found that the 1980s are a "fabulous" theme with her instructors because that's a period they are familiar with. She's also taught Chaucer using an escape concept; each team took a character and built their games around that.

2) Use images and text that are consistent with your theme. In a quick example to introduce the concept of the escape game to her session attendees (both in-person and virtual), she chose the theme of the Appalachian Trail and used clues, pictures and data pertinent to that topic.

3) Work backwards. Once you've selected a theme, figure out the last lock first — the one that will enable students to answer the final mystery — and move backward to the first lock they'll be tackling. For an hour-long event, she suggested three to four locks "with red herrings added in" to misguide students.

4) Test your game. It's the only way, said Ritter-Guth, that you'll know if you're missing anything, like a number lock. Have others test it too.

5) Make revisions. If you're teaching multiple sections of a course, create separate sets of locks with different clues and answers, Ritter-Guth advised, "because word spreads quickly."