Escaping Boredom with Breakout EDU

Anyone out there starting to feel cabin fever, like me? At times it can be hard to turn off the television and just be present with your family. We live in a day and age where the 24 hour news cycle can suck us into a black hole of information overload, and it has gone into overdrive with the coronavirus news.

Take some time today to engage with your family in a new type of activity - an escape room! For me, I love them! You go to a room that’s decorated to fit an interesting theme, it is filled with clues, and you have to decipher how to fit them together in order to break open locks. Well, we can’t do that when we are trying to socially distance ourselves, but there is a way we can do them at home, right on our computers.

Cue Breakout EDU, an online platform that allows you to bring the atmosphere of an escape room to your classroom! They have physical games with real locks and puzzles to be solved, but they also have digital versions of an escape room as well. The games challenge students to think outside of the box as the clues have minimal words with the pictures. Students have to piece the information they have together to break out of different types of locks, which include color locks, word locks, number locks, and directions locks.

Currently, they have over 350 free games that anyone can access. They even break them down by content and age appropriate grade level. As a teacher who uses Breakout EDU in my own classroom, I would suggest looking into their full platform access to give you over 1600 digital and physical games. Having the full platform access has been a game changer both in my classroom and as I have transitioned to a distance learning teacher. Even when I am at home, I am able to send my students games digitally that they can use to review content, collaborate with their family, and most importantly, have fun while doing it!

So I challenge you to get started with a game, so you can put yourself in your students’ shoes. Can you help Lola the Ladybug get back to her family?! The Lost Ladybug (Hint if you cannot access the link immediately, create a FREE platform access)

Check out this landing page Breakout EDU created specifically for distance learning at home. You can find a list of digital games linked for easy access at Breakout EDU Fun at Home.

Are you looking for more free games? Check this out - Breakout Edu Free Games.

Are you curious to learn more about the process that goes into writing a Breakout EDU game? Then read about my own process as I wrote a Breakout EDU game in my article Breakout EDU Game Designer.

Breakout EDU Game Designer

I published my very first Breakout EDU game - Searching for the Sea!

You maybe wondering, what is Breakout EDU? A quick rundown is that it’s an escape room for the classroom! It gets students out of their seats and collaborating together to solves puzzles to breakout of a box.

Starting in February, Breakout EDU ran their first cohort of teachers to learn how to make a Breakout EDU game from scratch! We shared ideas, critiqued each others’ puzzles, learned how to screencast, and eventually left the cohort with a published game. I absolutely loved the experience because it connected me with other like-minded educators as well as learning the skills to create a game that is puzzle-based and not worksheet based. I always say, “DITCH the worksheets!’ and this really put me to the test. The puzzles for each lock are not meant to be a worksheet hidden in a different format, but rather a true puzzle that will make students think and collaborate together.

Going into the process I knew it would be time consuming, but I found that generating the puzzles was easier as you started to create a few because I learned how to think differently. Now for me, personally, it took me longer than I would have liked because I was juggling learning how to balance my time between work and taking care of my newborn. However, when I clicked submit - boy did it feel empowering. Here I am a new mother, of a now five month old, and I created a Breakout EDU game from scratch in between feedings, diaper changes, snuggles, and oh yeah, my actual teaching job too!

While I have a lot more ideas running around in my head, I will definitely sit on them a bit, so I can enjoy more snuggles and finish out the school year. If you’re interested in learning how to design your own Breakout EDU game be sure to checkout the Game Design Tutorials.

And if you want your own class to play Searching for the Sea, get Breakout EDU’s paid-for platform. I promise, you won’t be sorry! It has transformed learning at my school!

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Want to learn more about Breakout EDU?! Click the link to learn all the ins-and-outs of why you need it at your school!