How to Build a DIY Escape Room for Your Classroom

We previously wrote about Escape Rooms here and here, and we were asked for escape room ideas for the classroom, especially clue ideas. We’re happy to share that we’ve designed our own Escape Room at GoGuardian headquarters with our own GoGuardians as test players, and now we’re giving away a free downloadable escape room kit with instructions, riddles, and clues so you can implement the escape room in your own classroom!

Escape rooms are a worldwide phenomenon, with adults and kids engaging in them for social activities, birthday parties, and team-building exercises. The goal of an escape room is for players to solve a series of puzzles that gets them out of a room within a set time limit.

What value does an escape room bring to classroom instruction?

Everything! Escape rooms are a great way to introduce gamified Learning to your students. They provide a nice break from the day-to-day assignments, engage your students, and give you a break from instructing. As most teachers know, when students find out that they’re watching a movie or playing a game in class, it piques their interest.

Besides being fun, how does an escape room supplement your students’ education plan? Participating in an escape room helps students develop important life skills, such as:

• Teamwork
• Goal setting and reaching
• Problem solving
• Pattern following
• Communication within a group
• Leadership skills
• Critical thinking skills
• Thinking outside the box

How do escape rooms fit into a classroom environment?

You don’t need levers and trap doors to build an escape room. With some creative decorating, the classroom can become the perfect environment to host one. The key to implementing an escape room is to:

• Pick a theme
• Gather supplies, including decorations and props
• Create interesting and challenging clues for your puzzles
• Find creative ways to place your puzzles and decorate your classroom

Because classrooms don’t have the advantage of sophisticated set designs of typical escape rooms, we’ve designed an entire escape room around the Halloween theme for you to use in your own classroom. This Halloween escape room e-kit contains detailed instructions, pre-written clues, downloadable printouts to use in your escape room.

Since we’re in an educational environment, our clues are academic so that students can employ different subjects to help them escape. Click on the link to download printable escape room puzzles so you can build your own DIY escape room on a budget.

Download the free classroom DIY Escape Room Kit

You can also visit Breakout EDU for more ideas and kits that you can buy.

Share this post with your fellow educators, and leave us a comment with your ideas for puzzles and clues!