Best Practices for Digital Escape Rooms
Portia Carryer, San Leandro Public Library pcarryer@sanleandro.org
Purpose of Digital Escape Rooms
Pre-Created Digital Escape Rooms
Purpose of Digital Escape Rooms
Escape rooms, both digital and in-person, offer the opportunity for participants to practice resilience, problem-solving, lateral thinking, and subject-specific skills in a gamified environment.
Digital escape rooms can be used to create either synchronous or asynchronous programming. In a synchronous model, participants might meet via Zoom or Google Hangouts and one participant would screen-share the digital escape room. This model allows for collaboration. In an asynchronous model, the escape room can be published to the community and participants engage on their own time.
Digital escape rooms offer access to library patrons who are unable to physically come to the library (which is everyone, right now!). Digital escape rooms are also low-to-no cost.
Types of Digital Escape Rooms
Digital escape rooms encapsulate a few different types of puzzle rooms (some of which can overlap!):
- Able to be solved in-game (no outside knowledge needed, just logic and willingness to try things!)
- Not able to be solved in-game (outside knowledge required; e.g. a Harry Potter trivia-based escape room)
- Subject specific (e.g., chemistry, math, English, etc)
- Themed rooms (e.g., magic, Ancient Greece, spies, etc)
- Spin-off rooms (e.g., Harry Potter, Six of Crows, etc)
Pre-Created Digital Escape Rooms
Breakout EDU is the leader in pre-created escape room resources. They’ve made many of their digital games available for free right now.
The Map
I always find it useful to map out the scenario and sequence of my rooms before jumping into the puzzle making. This also helps me to brainstorm puzzles that fit naturally with my theme. Even more than physical escape rooms, digital escape rooms depend on a strong narrative structure to give players a sense of engagement and satisfaction.
Lock Paper Scissors is a resource I found useful when first starting to build escape rooms.
The basic formula is:
You are in the midst of [activity] when [bad thing happens]. In order to [escape/catch the criminal/etc], you must [task].
Here is what the map for my Library of Alexandria escape room looked like. (Note -- some of the puzzles were still in the planning stages when I moved from my map to the actual form!) The narrative is on the right and my notes to myself are on the left. Squares in yellow are puzzles, while white squares on the left are images I need to find.
1. | 2. |
3. | 4. |
Types of Puzzles
I think the most exciting escape room puzzles are tied into the story or theme -- what this means, though, is that there’s no easy way to just plug in puzzles from a list.
For example, a word lock for my Library of Alexandria puzzle relied on choosing which canopic jar Antony’s heart was in (in order to put it with Cleopatra’s and avoid her curse). To choose the correct jar, players had to read through a section of Antony’s speech in the Shakespeare play and identify the capitalized letters.
Types of puzzle | Resources for creating puzzles |
Word search Maze (correct path connects letters or numbers) Spot the difference Spot the pattern Riddles Acrostic Anagrams Capitalized letters in plain text Misspelled letters in plain text (either jumbled or 1 letter omitted to create answer to lock) Spot the # of object Code w/ key (e.g., message written in another language or in symbols) Cipher w/ key (e.g., pigpen cipher) Embed audio/video, count # of X in audio/video Ambigrams Backwards writing Crossword puzzles (last word not filled in? Word spelled by intersection of clues) Sudoku (solved except for certain numbers?) Plain text with missing letters |
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Using Google Forms
There are several good tutorials for using Google Forms to create digital escape rooms. I like this one in particular: Bespoke Classroom, just scroll down for the form-specific instructions.
A few notes:
Each puzzle/lock will need to go into its own section. Each question/puzzle needs to be marked as “Required”.
I like to set up the response validation to “Regular Expression” “matches” and then the answer. I also add in custom error text. Note too that I use the “Description” feature to tell the player how to format their answer. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to figure out if the answer to a puzzle is “Hawk” or “HAWK” or “hawk” or “A hawk” or “the hawk” or “The hawk”
You can also use multiple choice questions. For this to work, you’ll need to make a section of your form a dead end and set all the wrong answers to go to that dead end. To make a section a dead end, make sure to set the “After # section” to “Go to previous section” (see the second image below, where it says After section 10 Go to section 9)
You can also use section breaks to create atmosphere and tension -- not every section needs to have a puzzle in it!