Student Engagement Strategies: Creating a Simple Digital Escape Room
Written by: Lauren Poole,Emily O'Pell
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways:
- Student engagement is critical in the classroom to ensure it bridges the gap between simply delivering information and ensuring that information is actually understood and retained
- Escape rooms have become more popular as student engagement activities in the classroom and can provide a collaborative way for students to work together and learn something new
- Setting up a digital escape room can be accomplished in four easy steps, including setting the scene, adding interactive elements, hyperlinking challenges, and building the lock with Google Forms
Every educator knows the struggle of looking out at a classroom and seeing a sea of students who resemble the melting emoji more than active participants. Eyes and thoughts drift off to anywhere but the assignment, and students totally check out. When students disconnect, learning stops.
This is why student engagement is critical; it is the bridge between simply delivering information and ensuring that information is actually processed and retained. Knowing how to engage students effectively requires moving beyond passive participation. It requires immersion. One of the most effective (and fun!) student engagement strategies I have found are digital escape rooms.
The beauty of this approach is that it transforms the classroom environment. Instead of students lamenting, “When am I ever going to use this?”, they are too busy earning their next escape code. By gamifying the curriculum, we are engaging students in learning through a narrative that rewards persistence and critical thinking.
Within the last decade, numerous versions of escape rooms have become more and more popular. Themes range from horror movies to casinos and even kidnapping scenarios. A few years ago, I used an escape room for the first time in my eighth-grade classroom. It was messy, and I gave students way too many clues, but we had fun. When the opportunity arose to create an escape room for my freshmen over “The Raven,” we were in the middle of the pandemic and about half of my students were virtual. It became a challenge to address the core issue of how to engage students in two environments at the same time. This is when I began researching the best way to make my escape room digital. It is time-consuming the first time, but it can be used again and again and again! I continue to use my original digital escape room creations year after year, even though all of my students are in the classroom.
“Instead of students lamenting, ‘When am I ever going to use this?’, they are too busy earning their next escape code.”
Digital, Collaborative Student Engagement Strategies for the Classroom
If you have ever been to an escape room, you know they do not give you many instructions. Figuring out how to play the game is part of the fun!
If you watch this video, I will show you how the digital escape room task looks from a student’s point of view. When I am using this in my class, I quickly explain the idea of an escape room and then set a timer for students to work. I often let them work in partners or small groups.
This collaborative approach is one of the most effective student engagement strategies because it encourages teamwork, time management, communication, delegation of tasks, and critical thinking to solve the puzzles and escape.
Some students enjoy the challenge and some get frustrated, but, overall, mostly everyone has fun while meeting the lesson objectives.
Why Student Engagement Is Important in the Modern Classroom
Before we dive into the “how,” we have to understand the “why.” Student engagement isn’t just about making things fun. Active student engagement is the top predictor of academic success. When students are engaged, they develop a sense of agency and curiosity. Digital escape rooms hit several key student engagement strategies simultaneously: gamification, collaboration, and critical thinking. By turning a lesson into a challenge, you shift the student from a passive consumer to an active problem-solver.
If you are looking for a practical way regarding how to engage students in a hybrid or fully in-person environment, building a digital escape room is a fantastic solution. Follow along with the steps below to see how I created my escape room and learn how to create your own!
Step-by-Step: How to Create a Digital Escape Room to Increase Student Engagement
1. Set the Scene
I created my escape room in Google Slides. The first thing I did was search for a background. In this case, I searched “room and ceiling background,” but there are so many options depending only on your purpose and ideas. Click here to see how to set a custom background on a Google Slide.
Creating a visual environment is one of my favorite parts of the process! The more “real” the room feels, the more invested students become in the mystery, the more engaged they are in the actual learning tasks of the escape room.
2. Add Interactive Elements
Next, I started searching for “transparent images” of items I wanted to place in the room to add to the ambiance and serve as physical checkpoints for the learning tasks. As you can see, I added an open window, a raven, books, a fireplace, a lamp, and a chair. Click here to see how to search, add, and size transparent images. In addition, this video shows you how to edit and change images to meet your needs.
3. Hyperlink Your Challenges
Following that, I linked an activity to each item. Students need to complete each activity to receive a code, and they have to put the code into a Google Form to see if they are correct.
The activities can be nearly limitless and are not limited to digital tasks for in-person learners. For instance, students could complete a matching activity or text-evidence sorting task, and you can provide them with the Google Form code upon completion. Digital challenges can vary from anything you can put into a Google Doc or Slides, web quests, Kahoot challenges, puzzles, and more! If you can hyperlink it or come up with a code at the end, you can use it as a step in your escape room. So, you probably can already use existing materials for this step! Click here to see a video that shows how to add these links to your images.
Diversifying these tasks is one of the best student engagement strategies for reaching different types of learners. Some students may excel at logic puzzles, while others shine during the text-evidence sorting. By mixing digital and physical tasks, you ensure that everyone has a way to contribute to their team’s escape.
4. Build the “Lock” with Google Forms
Once all activities were created and linked, I created a Google Form with response validation turned on. Click here to watch a video that will show you how to create a Google Form with response validation. When students correctly crack each code, they escape and submit their forms with the correct codes to “escape” or complete the assignment!
“By turning a lesson into a challenge, you shift the student from a passive consumer to an active problem-solver.”
Engaging Students in Learning Across the Curriculum
Digital escape rooms are an excellent way to introduce a unit or review a unit. As an English teacher, the two escape rooms I use both check comprehension and mastery of skills we study during the story/poem. For example, the escape room over “The Raven” checks plot comprehension, knowledge about Poe, and also literary and poetic techniques like allusion and rhyme scheme.
Escape rooms could also be fun ways to introduce a novel or unit with more of an emphasis on research and background knowledge. Although this blog gives an example of how this can be used in an English class, it can be used in so many different contexts. Activities can include anything you might assign in a worksheet form:
- True/False puzzles
- Multiple-choice question chains
- Sequencing historical events
- Solving math equations to find the “next room” code
Basically, if there is a concrete answer, there can be ways to turn the questions into escape-room-themed tasks.
Expanding Across Content Areas
Science and history classes can easily theme an escape room over a unit they have studied or as an introduction to a unit. Looking at the 8th Grade Indiana Social Studies standards, one that jumps out as an opportunity for an escape room is “Standard 8.4.2 Identify and explain the four types of economic systems (traditional, command, market, and mixed)…”
Each separate economic system could have a separate “digital station” as part of the escape room. Students could be introduced to each concept via a video, article, or primary source document and complete tasks or answer questions to show their knowledge and get the “code” for that specific station.
Math teachers can also use this to increase student engagement by creating “order of operations” challenges where the result of one problem serves as the key to unlock the next clue. This gamified approach turns a repetitive practice session into a high-stakes mission.
Science teachers could simulate a “lab accident” where students must correctly identify mystery elements or balance chemical equations to “unlock” the ventilation system. This type of immersive storytelling is a powerful way regarding how to engage students who might otherwise find the content dry.
Final Thoughts on How to Engage Students Digitally
The goal of any educator is to create a lasting impact. When we focus on student engagement, we aren’t just making class “fun”; we are making it memorable. Digital escape rooms offer a low-cost, high-impact way to make memories and academic progress!
If you feel overwhelmed by the tech, start small. You don’t need a “mansion” for your first attempt. A single room with three simple tasks is enough to see a massive difference in how your students respond. Once you see the lightbulbs go off and that melting emoji changing into grins, you’ll understand why student engagement is important enough to justify the prep time.
Personally, we have used escape rooms successfully in middle and high school English classes, but if you are up to the challenge, we encourage you to do this in your content area and grade level. Click here for a ready-to-go Slides crime scene that you can use and customize to help you get started adding your tasks and links.
We are always here to help and would love to see what you create! We hope this allows you to try a digital escape room of your own in your classroom. Feel free to contact us if you need any help or extra support.
FAQs:
Why is student engagement so important?
Student engagement is critical because it bridges the gap between simply sharing information and ensuring that information is actually understood. Engaging students effectively requires more than passive participation; it requires immersion. When engaged, students have higher rates of retention and success.
What are some simple ways to boost student engagement?
Get ideas of 25+ simple ways to boost student engagement from our KINL training.
Why should I try a digital escape room in the classroom?
Escape rooms offer the opportunity to implement a fun theme and give students a chance to collaborate. Digital escape rooms develop skills like teamwork, time management, communication, delegation of tasks, and critical thinking to solve the puzzles and escape.
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