Make an Escape Room on Google Forms
How to Make an Escape Room on Google Forms? Escape rooms can be a fun way to engage students, but they should also be taken seriously.[1]Some of the more realistic scenarios can trigger real-life stress and anxiety, so it is important to make sure they are appropriate for your students.
This article shows you how to create your own escape room using Google Forms! It’s a low-prep activity that will get your students excited about learning again.
What is a digital escape room?
A digital escape room is an educational game where students are given a series of clues, hints, and strategies in order to solve a mystery. They then use those clues to unlock a digital lock and escape the room.[2]
There are several types of digital escape rooms to choose from: -Lock and key style rooms, where students need to figure out the code in order to unlock a lock. -Branching style rooms, where students need to solve a puzzle in order to break out of a locked room. -Branching style rooms can be played in groups or independently and are perfect for grades 3-4.
Whether you’re looking for a fun activity to add to your math class or a new way to engage your students, a digital escape room is an excellent option! They’re highly engaging and encourage academic practice in a competitive environment. They can also be used to teach important concepts like logical thinking, teamwork, and troubleshooting.[3]
If you’re ready to get started with creating your own digital escape room, check out this free course. The course includes step-by-step videos that will show you how to create a digital escape room and includes many example rooms to give you inspiration! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter so you’ll receive updates on new resources, product launches, and more! And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!
How to make a Google Forms escape room
Using Google Forms to create your own digital escape room is easy and requires minimal prep. [4]There are no copies, laminating, or forced accounts needed – students simply get the link and they’re ready to go! This is a great way to engage students and provide academic practice in a fun, competitive environment.
PLEASE NOTE: This resource includes a link to YouTube and Jigsaw Planet, which your school district may block, so please check with them before using this product in your classroom. This resource is 100% editable and customizable for your classroom needs. This activity will take about 30 minutes from start to finish. It’s great for 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students!
Escape rooms can be great for engaging students and providing academic practice in a fun, competitive environment. They are also a great opportunity to build community in your classroom, and they can help students work together while addressing social-emotional learning goals. [5]
Google Forms
Escape rooms are a great way to encourage teamwork and collaboration. They also offer a unique opportunity to gamify content, and to engage students in the classroom.
However, making a Google Forms escape room isn’t all that easy.[6] It’s a clunky process that involves endless tinkering, previewing, testing, and repeating.
Select a Skills Focus
Escape rooms are a unique test of wits that challenge teams, families and groups to use clues and solve puzzles within a time limit. Whether you’re planning a family day out, or a corporate team building event, these are fun and interactive activities that can boost morale.
Escape room games can improve team-building skills and increase empathy among teammates. They allow for team members to share their mistakes and overcome them together, which helps build team spirit and reduces blaming. Moreover, they also help develop leadership and communication skills.[7]
The right puzzles can also engage a wider range of learning approaches, such as cooperative, logic, sensory, searching, and physical tasks. This allows for a balance between motivation and challenge in order to achieve the learning objectives [8].
In addition, it is important that the escape game is designed with the learner in mind. To this end, educators can utilise techniques such as focus groups, interviews, surveys and academic records to gain insight into the learners’ learning objectives, challenges and preferences. This will enable them to create a personalized EER experience that meets the needs of their students.
One way to ensure a high-quality escape room is to conduct paper prototyping and play testing with small groups of learners before building the actual game. This helps to catch any errors or gaps in the design, and it can also help identify the flow of the puzzles.[9]
Another way to increase the quality of your Google Forms Escape Room is to use a form timer app, which can be downloaded and installed for free. These apps let you set a specific time limit for the form and generate a link that can be shared with players.
Using this tool can also make it easier to manage and track player progress. The app can show the players which questions they have answered correctly and the remaining ones they need to answer in order to complete their escape room.
In addition, using a digital escape room on Google Sites can be an engaging activity for students of all ages, even preschoolers! They love the stories and puzzles they are able to complete, and the fact that they must race against time makes them more eager to continue.[10]
Create The Tasks
If you’re looking to gamify and engage your students with something a little more creative than a simple quiz, you can make a digital escape room on Google Forms. You can even make it a class-wide or small-group activity, if you wish!
First, decide what the main goal of your escape room is.[11] You can use this to inspire your design, so that you create a story and build the puzzles around a specific theme.
Next, decide what kinds of questions or tasks you want your students to complete in order to meet your objective. For example, do you want them to read an article, watch a video, complete a logic puzzle, or reference class materials?[12]
Once you’ve decided the purpose and content of your puzzles, you’re ready to start creating them on Google forms. The process can be a little tricky, though. If you’re not used to creating conditional logic in Google forms, it can be a little overwhelming.
The best way to approach the process is to break it down into stages. This will make it easier to track your progress and keep on top of the different question types that you might need to create.[13]
After creating your first section, title it and add a clue (with an open-text answer type) to the form. You can also use this space to include a description of the puzzle and any directions students may need to follow along with it.
Lastly, you’ll need to create the final question that students must answer to unlock the escape room. This question should involve aspects of all the other clues, so that students can combine their knowledge to solve the final mystery.
Despite its limitations, Google forms is a great platform to build basic virtual escape rooms for your classroom.[14] However, you may wish to try a professional form-building tool for more customization options. In the meantime, you can use this guide to get started on your own!
Come Up with a Story
Whether you’re creating an escape room for your classroom or for family and friends, it’s important to come up with a story that will guide students through the experience. It can be based on the theme you selected or completely separate from it, but it should establish the context for the puzzles and challenges that players will face.[15]
Once you have your story, you can start adding questions to your Google Forms escape room. Make sure to include a few visual flourishes, like thematic images and photo clues, to keep your students engaged throughout the game.
You can also use the response validation feature to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to answer your questions correctly. When students click the answer button, you can give them feedback if they answered incorrectly, and encourage them to try again if they need a refresher on the rules of the game.[16]
Another fun way to teach students how to use Google Forms is by creating choose your own adventure stories, which are similar to escape rooms in that they offer students small choices to help them progress through the story. These choices can have a big impact on how the story unfolds, and are a great way to build social emotional learning skills while fostering creative writing.
A final tip when it comes to using Google Forms for escape rooms is to set a time limit, or ‘lockout’, on your form. This allows you to control how quickly students can complete the puzzles, which is important if you’re working with a class that has different levels of speed or attention span.[17]
The time limit should be determined by the number and complexity of your puzzles. This will allow you to maintain students’ attention while not feeling too rushed or overwhelming them.
It is also a good idea to make sure that all answers are contained within your Form, so you don’t have to turn to other online resources to find them. This will save you time and stress when it comes to resolving puzzles that students aren’t able to solve.[18]
Passwords & Locks
Escape rooms are a popular form of entertainment that require participants to complete a series of tasks in order to “escape” the room. They’ve become popular in board games and movies, and now they’re popping up online! The premise is simple: participants have to solve a set of puzzles to gain passwords, clues, or other information they need to “escape” the room.[19]
If you’re looking for an easy way to make your own escape room, consider using Google forms. These are free and easy to use. However, you must keep in mind that they don’t allow as much customization as other options such as YouTube and Classtime.
One of the best ways to add an extra level of challenge to your escape room is with digital locks. Adding these to your form can help students practice and reinforce what they learned in your lesson, while also providing an additional layer of difficulty.[20]
Once you’ve set up your locks, students can then enter a variety of different passwords to unlock them. They can then check their accuracy and progress through their “escape” using Classtime’s teacher dashboard.
When creating your locks, be sure to choose a password that’s both unique and difficult. The order of characters and the variety of characters used can have a significant impact on how hard it is to break the lock.
Another option is to set up a password that has a random number in it, and that will change after every entry. This makes it harder for students to guess the password and can help students feel more secure in your game.
In addition to passwords, you can also include digital locks in your escape room that require a code or a picture that can be guessed. This is a great way to get students thinking critically about how they would approach solving a password puzzle, and it will be an added challenge for them!
Whether you want to add passwords or locks to your digital escape room, make sure that it is based on your learning goals and objectives. You can also make sure that it’s not too challenging for your students to complete by adding a session timer to your escape room.
