Breakout EDU Digital Platform

It's time for a tech tip...why? Because it's Tuesday!

Those of you who know me well know that I enjoy escape rooms immensely--so much so that we've modeled our annual STEMBreak professional development workshop after more traditional breakout rooms. Students find it very exciting to work together to solve problems when they're framed as breakout-style challenges. For the past few years, I've had my AP Psychology complete breakout activities to review cognition and social psychology topics, and a couple of years ago my AP Biology class created a life science themed breakout activity for the freshman bio students.

As much as I enjoy using full-on escape rooms with my classes, the planning, design, and execution of such experiences can be very time-consuming, and so I've made use of the online platform called Breakout EDU Digital to create a comparable experience for my students online. The site includes many pre-made breakout activities (some of which are free to access), and a paid subscription allows you to create your own.

To give you a sense of how these online games work, here are two examples:

• 'Twas the night before Christmas - I modified this one a bit from a pre-made sample. It doesn't correlate with any particular discipline, but it does let you see the mechanics of the puzzles--and it's written for about middle-high school level. My students took about 25 minutes to complete it.
• Mendelia's milkshake - This is a biology activity that I created for Breakout EDU last summer. It's written for entry-level bio students learning about DNA and protein synthesis, so it provides a good example of how a game might be content-driven. It should take a student about 20 minutes to complete it, and doing so demonstrates their mastery of particular topics.

If you're interested in using either real or online breakout experiences with your classes, I'd be happy to help out. (I keep a large collection of lockboxes and customizable padlocks on hand.) Just let me know!