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The Great Classroom Escape
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The Great Classroom Escape has truly become a family business. I’m Kiersten, the creator of The Great Classroom Escape. I grew up on a small island in Washington State, then headed 3,000 miles from home to attend college at the University of Pennsylvania. The plan was to major in engineering, but a year or so in, I realized my true passion was finding ways to teach kids who are struggling to learn. My major changed to elementary education.
I met my husband, Ben, while at Penn. We moved around a lot during the first 15 years of our marriage! I taught Kindergarten and 6th grade, and did reading intervention with 2nd-5th grade. We also had three beautiful children who keep us very busy.
A few years ago, I found myself doing something I swore I would never do – homeschooling my kids. It was fascinating to see the different learning styles of my three kids. One thing they all had in common was their dislike of practicing math with worksheets. I began making brain teasers, puzzles, and math escape rooms for my kids. I loved watching how excited and engaged they were in practicing math. The idea for The Great Classroom Escape was born.
This was amazing. My kids were struggling with some of the math concepts so I purchased this. They love Escape rooms and they were completely involved. It worked well online and helped us improve skills.
Here are some of the most frequently asked questions we get about using our escape rooms & creating your own online breakouts for your own class or to sell commercially.
No! You can do a digital escape room in your class with virtually no prep! Some have optional printable recording pages or invitations. Our digital escape rooms that run on Google Forms™ are automated, self-checking, and super easy to implement. Now if you’d like to go all out and dress up to get kids engaged with the backstory, go for it!
Absolutely! Our digital escape rooms are perfect for both in-person or distance learning. The downloadable PDF includes tips and tricks to for using these breakouts for distance or hybrid learning.
No! All of the information needed to solve the puzzles in our escape rooms is contained within the Google Form™.
That is by far the hardest question to answer. We offer a few “Quick Escapes” which are designed to be completed in 15-20 minutes. Most of our escape rooms will take students around 45 minutes, but students with a strong grasp of the concepts may be able to complete the activities much quicker. Other factors affecting how long the activities take include whether students work individually or in groups, if calculators are allowed, or if students are required to document their work.
There are a lot of websites and programs you can choose from to build digital escape rooms. I recommend using Google Forms™ because it is easy to create automated, self-checking escape rooms that are accessible by almost anyone with an internet connection. While some school systems block outside Google Forms, you can give teachers the option to create a copy of the form so that it will originate from within their school system.
No! You do not need to be a Google Classroom™ user, or even have a Gmail account to complete an escape room on Google Forms. All of The Great Classroom Escape’s online breakouts include a “quick link” that takes students directly to the form to begin the escape room. There is no need to log in. We also include a “Copy Form” option for all of our products so that teachers who are familiar with Google Forms can save the form to their own Google Drive, edit the form (to some extent), and view student results. We recommend doing this if you create your own breakouts to sell!
If you plan to sell the escape rooms that you create, then you will need to carefully check any licensing rules for the images you intend to use. You can find great commercial use clipart on Teachers Pay Teacher, just be sure to check the author’s terms of use. Other sources are Storyblocks and Deposit Photos. Please be sure to read the licensing information carefully.
There are many platforms that you can sell escape rooms on. The majority of my sales come through the marketplace on Teachers Pay Teachers. Others sell on Amazon Ignite, Etsy, their own blogs, and other online marketplaces.
Copyright © 2021 Kiersten Yager Williams All Rights Reserved