Response Validation Trick in Digital Escape Rooms

When I speak with teachers about what they are looking for in educational escape rooms, one of the main answers I get is that they should be easy to implement and self-checking. I create the majority of my educational escape rooms using Google Forms^TM for this reason. By using response validation, it is you can create questions that do not allow students to progress until the correct answer is entered. Response validation in short-answer questions automates the breakout process.

If you are an experienced Google Forms user, you may know that response validation can be very finicky! I make math escape rooms, and often times the answer that students need to enter is a number. The problem arises when some students type the number with a comma, and others do not. One solution I used to use was including specific directions in with the questions such as, “DO NOT use a comma.” In today’s quick tip, I want to share with you how to allow two different answers to be accepted by response validation.

In this example, the short answer question says, “Type the number five thousand, fifteen using digits.” Here is how you have the form accept both 5015 and 5,015 as correct responses.

1. Use the + icon to create a new question.
2. Select “short answer” from the dropdown of question types
3.  Toggle the button at the bottom right to make the question required
4. Click the three vertical dots and choose “Response Validation.”
5. From the two dropdowns on the left, choose “Regular Expression” and “Contains”
6. Enter your acceptable answers with a | between them. The | in a regular expression is an alternator and means “or”. So, if you type 5,015|5015, then the form will accept either 5,015 OR 5015 as correct answers.
7. Enter your custom error text. This might be simply words like “Keep Trying,” or a hint to the puzzle.

It’s that simple! Now if you were to try this out in a form, you might discover that the form now accepts an answer such as 95015s because it contains 5015. To avoid this problem, you can use two other regex (regular expression) symbols. Adding a ^ symbol prior to the start of an acceptable answers and a $ at the end of the string limits to the response to exactly what is between those characters. So to allow the acceptable response to be exactly 5,015 or 5015, you can type it into the form creator like this:

^5015$|^5,015$

Using the vertical line | in a regular expression will work with words, phrases, or other possibilities as well. You aren’t just limited to two choices either. You can have a longer string of acceptable answers; simply put a | between each answer choice.

Next week’s quick tip will be about how to accept short answers that are not case sensitive. Students can often get frustrated when their answers to escape rooms aren’t accepted simply because they forget to capitalize a letter! Check back next Tuesday for this quick tip!