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USF Stavros Center presents:�

Promote Financial Literacy through Escape Rooms

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April 25, 2024

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Lisa Lawson

Adam Kloper

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Welcome Teachers!

Welcome to our Escape Room workshop!!

In true Escape Room fashion, there are no handouts yet. 

The handouts will be earned by breaking open your first lock box!

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Escape Room #1

Unfortunately, we failed to prepare properly. We made handouts. We organized the PowerPoint. But we made one fatal mistake. All the handouts for the training got locked in these lock boxes. For us to proceed with this training we need you to open these boxes and get your handouts back. We will provide the clues.

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Our Workshop Sponsor����

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Escape Room Rules�

  1. Have Fun.
  2. No cheating!
  3. Risk-free environment, support and encourage others.
  4. Think outside the box!

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Workshop Goals

  • What is an escape room?
  • Types of escape rooms
  • Ways to create  escape rooms
  • Tie to standards
  • Funding
  • Resources/how to find premade ones

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What is an Escape Room?

  • An escape room is a type of game or challenge increasing in popularity around the world. 
  • Players are "locked" into a room or situation and have to search for clues, solve puzzles,and/or decipher codes to escape.
  • Often participants have a time constraint for this challenge.

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Why Escape Rooms?

  • Great teambuilding opportunities
  • Icebreaker
  • Develop critical thinking, observation, problem-solving and communication skills
  • Highly engaging in academic settings
  • Fun!!

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Types of Escape Rooms

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  • Commercial (paid experiences)
  • Subscription based - Breakout Edu
    • Electronic -software
    • Purchased kits used with subscription
  • DIY
    • Create a themed physical room (actual or model)
    • Electronic (make your own software)
    • Kit (design and assemble yourself)
      • Series of envelopes
      • Physical lockboxes with various locks and keys

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Why DIY Escape Rooms?

  • Can tie directly to standards being covered in class
  • Customizable –difficulty, theme, style of puzzles
  • Highly engaging
  • Inexpensive
  • Fun to make
  • Fun to play

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How to: The Basics

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Creating a Theme

Ties puzzles and décor in escape room together.

Decorations, props, puzzles and clues should all support the theme.

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Creating a Theme

Themes tied to Financial Literacy:

  • Saving
  • Investing
  • Budgeting
  • Buying Goods and Services
  • Market Economy
  • Working with Currency
  • Using Credit and Loans
  • Inflation

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Creating a Theme

Other Theme ideas:

Any Modern Decade Animals

Historic Periods Seasons

Places Factory

Professions Military

Content areas Movie

Science Fiction Book

Science Fact Game

Fantasy Video Game

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Creating a Theme

  • Don’t absolutely have to have a theme. Could just have a series of puzzles.
  • Can also have a plot or narrative in addition to a theme.
  • Plot answers these questions:
    • Why are players in the room?
    • How did they get there?
    • What do they need to escape?
    • What happens if they don’t escape?
    • Why do they need to hurry (justify time limit)?
    • Who is the host? Why is the host there and giving hints?

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Creating a Theme: Escape Room Narratives

  • Host may read something or play an audio recording or video.
  • Narrative examples:
  • Escape an unpleasant place
  • Investigate crime/mystery
  • Be an explorer
  • Find missing person
  • Free a person or animal
  • Survive

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Narratives can be Broad

Examples:

  • Someone kind locked you in a room with a test of wits. If you escape you will earn something good.
  • Someone friendly needs your help to do something important to help them out.
  • Someone villainous did something bad. You are trapped. After you figure out what they did and fix it you can escape and survive.

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Narratives can be Specific

Examples:

  • You are private investigators solving a case. You are trying to catch a famous art thief. You are in a hotel room he stayed in while he robbed the museum. By following clues left behind you can figure out what was stolen and where he is hiding out to help catch the thief and return the stolen artwork.
  • You are explorers who discovered an ancient Egyptian tomb. Upon entering the tomb, it shuts. You must solve puzzles to escape the curse of the pharaoh and survive.

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Narrative Tips

  • Add emotion to plots: noble goals, serious consequences, urgent time constraints, plot twists
  • Make decorations as elaborate as your resources allow
  • Remove things from the room that don’t fit the time period
  • Leak details about characters over time
  • Show what characters are feeling
  • Make participants care about the characters and keep characters’ goals in mind

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Narrative Tips-Qualities of Good Narrative�

  • Doesn’t involve too much reading
  • Develops story along with puzzles and clues
  • Sets up circumstances that generate emotion
  • Involves compelling characters
  • Answers the questions regarding why, how, what, and when related to the escape room.

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Creating the Atmosphere�

  • Rooms and Decorations
    • Levels and Intensity -can be simple and minimally decorated
    • Consider:
    • room size to fit the narrative
    • Number of items in room

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  • Creating the Atmosphere��
    • Decorating Tips:�Easiest way to dramatically change a room-adjust lighting
    • Use Command Hooks to hang decorations
    • Use props-clocks, trash cans, books, etc.
    • Painted cardboard boxes 
    • Search Internet for Inspiration
    • Check out Thrift stores, Party stores, Dollar stores
    • Use fabric to cover walls or parts of walls
    • Use music
    • Use decorations as hiding places

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Creating Puzzles

  • Write puzzles in layers
  • Include extraneous information
  • Hide clue words in room
  • Linear flow-requires puzzles to be solved in order
  • Non-linear puzzles: better for larger groups, can divide and conquer
  • Can Count, Sort, Find, Solve, Assemble, Unscramble
  • Provide a variety of puzzle types
  • Can add Side Goals-additional task besides escaping: disable security alarms, encrypting computer files, discover key info, bring certain item out of room

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Electronic Escape Room

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Electronic Escape Room

  • Breakout EDU continued

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Electronic Escape Room

  • Breakout EDU
  • 1. Students play pre-existing electronics games tied to standards. Hints guides are available for all games.
  • 2. Students play purchased-kit based games with an electronic component
  • 3. Students can CREATE their own games, teacher must approve before published-wonderful way to differentiate for higher-performing students.

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Electronic Escape Room

  • Breakout EDU
  • Play a sample game:
  • Breakout EDU

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Electronic Escape Room

  • Breakout EDU
  • Play a sample game:
  • Breakout EDU

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Electronic Escape Room

Breakout EDU

Can search pre-existing games by

grade (preK to adult), subject, or game type (digital or kit)

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Electronic Escape Room

  • Breakout EDU

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Electronic Escape Room

  • Breakout EDU

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Electronic Escape Room-Breakout EDU has free debrief activities. ��

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4C+Cards+Download.png (4390×7260) (squarespace.com)

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Electronic Escape� Room

Breakout EDU has clues for

all published games.

I keep one for each subject for

each grade level in Sub Plans and

periodically update.

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Break

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Electronic escape room

  • You are the owners of a small business that needs to make some money this quarter or it will go out of business.
  • To keep your business alive, you must get $10,000 from investors.
  • To get a meeting with the first investor you must answer the questions attached to this link.

https://tinyurl.com/2bgcx57l

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How I created e room

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Examples of Clues

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  • Decipher
  • Barcode text
  • QR codes
  • Types of puzzles
  • Black lights and invisible markers

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Envelope Escape Room

Escape from Pirate Island!!!! 

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You have been kidnapped taken to Pirate Island. 

Your only means of escaping is answering these 3 puzzles! 

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Physical Model Escape Room

Students can design escape rooms and build and decorate models of the rooms. They can then using programming code to write and solve puzzles to escape from the maze-style rooms. Here is an example of a work in progress by 5th grade students.

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Funding

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  • PTA Grants
  • CTA Grants
  • Donors Choose
  • Professional Association Grants
  • Facebook: Buy Nothing groups, Hillsborough County Free Stuff group, Adopt a Hillsborough Teacher
  • Hillsborough Education Foundation Grants-not subscriptions or technology devices

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Make Your Own!

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How do YOU see using Escape Rooms with your students?

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Questions?

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The Do-It-Yourself Escape Room Book – A Practical Guide to Writing Your Own Clues, Designing Puzzles, and Creating Your Own Challenges by Paige Ellsworth Lyman was used for some of our workshop content

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Thank You!

We hope this workshop provided a much welcomed Escape!!