Trial and Error: Building an Escape Room in Schoology

In my quest to keep things interesting for my students, I started looking for ways to build an escape room using Schoology.   There was surprisingly very little information out there for how to do this with the exception of some great how-to videos a teacher I follow on YouTube created.  She had some instructions available about using completion rules to set up an escape room.  I will include her YouTube links at the end of this post.

Setting up an escape room style lesson was pretty easy to do, and I created one to try out with my sixth grade social studies.  Now I would love to say the escape room was a hit and all of my kids loved it, however I encountered some problems that are pretty easy to fix if you are planning to try an activity like this.

The first problem was the lesson I chose for the escape room.  I tried to give them new information in an interesting way and that was a mistake.  I would recommend using the escape room as a review, rather than presenting new information this way.  My students were frustrated and the activity seemed to drag for them because it was taking a long time for them to get to the locks  and move forward.  This is an activity that works best when it's faster paced and that means using content students are familiar with.  

The next problem came with the quiz parts of the escape room.  After the students completed a short reading, they had a short quiz.  The two issues that came up were how the information they had to read was presented and how I set up the quiz portions to be graded.  I embedded the reading in Power Point presentations.  This proved difficult for students as they had to toggle between the information and the quiz, so I would recommend hard copies of that information for the students to read and refer back to as they work through the escape room.  Maybe you could have numbered "clue" boxes set up in the room, and they have to get the next reading clue out of an actual box before they can move on.

Finally, I set up the quiz grades so the students had to reach 100 percent in order to move on to the next part of the escape room.  I did give them 3 chances to take the quiz, but this still proved difficult for some of my students.   The options that I would recommend for fixing this would be lower the passing rate to something like 80 percent, and or giving them a chance to see what they missed (this is an option on Schoology quizzes).

I don't claim to be an expert on any of this, but I felt the need to make this a learning experience for myself and to share the possible solutions I created with anyone who might be creating an escape room like this,   On the upside of this experience, I chatted with my students after this lesson and they did enjoy it and said they would like to try another one.  With Christmas just around the corner, I feel a holiday themed escape room coming on!


YouTube links:

Behind the Scenes Look at Creating a Digital Breakout Game in Schoology
youtu.be/JqhqjJXgrWg


Creating Learning Module with Student Completion Rules in Schoology
https://youtu.be/SCvoZo8V3_s​


References:
Cuje, S. (2019, January 22). Behind the Scenes Look at Creating a Digital Breakout Game in Schoology [Video file]. Retrieved December 7, 2020, from https://youtu.be/JqhqjJXgrWg


Cuje, S.  (2019, August 20). Creating Learning Module with Student Completion Rules in Schoology [Video file]. Retrieved December 7, 2020, from https://youtu.be/SCvoZo8V3_s



1:03 / 6:38













Creating Learning Module with Student Completion Rules in Schoology