While I have participated in a few Breakouts at trainings, workshops and conferences, I hadn’t been brave enough to try creating my own and/or doing a pre-made one with my students. Part of the problem was that I was overwhelmed by the idea of how much work I imagined it would be-and while creating one certainly took some careful planning, I’m happy to report it wasn’t nearly as cumbersome and challenging as I had pictured!
In late January, one of my 6th grade teachers approached me about doing something fun with her students to go along with their Ancient Egypt unit prior to them going on February break. With this Cool Tool topic in mind (and our district’s recent purchase of six breakout kits), I suggest we try doing a Breakout with them!
Since our district also purchased full platform access to the BreakoutEDU site, I immediately checked out the website to see what they already had for ancient Egypt. While the two games available looked fun, I wasn’t sure how they matched up with what the students had been learning in the classroom. Instead, the teacher and I looked at the Ancient Egypt centers and activities students would be doing leading up to the Breakout so I could understand their learning goals and the teacher left me with my own copy of the packet for further brainstorming.
Ultimately, I decided that the pre-made games would be fun if the purpose of the Breakout was to introduce students to their ancient Egypt unit but, if students were going to be using the Breakout to review their unit before a test (the teacher’s stated goal), I would need to design my own Breakout based on their center activities.
Using the game design worksheet available on the BreakoutEDU site, I started brainstorming puzzles that could be created using their center activities from the week before. At first glance, the length of the game design worksheet looks overwhelming but, it was incredibly helpful when it came to organizing my thoughts and making sure the puzzles were coming together in a way that would be solvable (and make sense) to the students. It also proved to be a handy cheat sheet for my library clerk and the classroom teacher on the day of the breakout. If students needed help and wanted to use one of their hint cards the other adults in the room had all the information they needed to guide students through their roadblock without everyone having to come to me, the main puzzle designer.
Some things we did that seemed to help the day go smoothly:
- Color coded the clue sets- I made 6 identical puzzle sets (we have 6 Breakout kits in our district) and made sure that each clue in each set had the same colored dot on the back. That way, if things got messy and crazy, we could quickly sort the clues and make sure that each set was complete again.
- Setup cheats- in addition to the color coding, each puzzle piece also had a small letter on the back, either an “H”, “B” or “T”. Clues with an “H” on the back needed to be hidden in the Breakout area. Clues with a “B” on the back needed to go in the Breakout puzzle box and clues with a “T” on the back were meant to be handed over by a teacher after a team successfully accomplished certain steps in the Breakout. This made setting up the puzzles between 6th grade rotations much quicker and meant that someone besides me could help with setup as well.
- Clearly defined work zones-We used colorful tape to mark out on the library rug separate, distinct areas for each team. Teams knew they were not to leave their area and that all clues and puzzles they needed to unlock their boxes were located in their area. This helped teams focus their search efforts and kept teams from accidentally grabbing the wrong clues and getting their puzzle sets all mixed up.
- A fun video introduction!-To introduce the setup for the Breakouts, I brought back a character our 6th graders meet earlier in the year, famed archeologist Professor Nordlaw. The kids loved seeing Professor Nordlaw again and the big twist (she realizes midway through the video that they’ve mistranslated the hieroglyphics and instead of sending us lucky gold that gets luckie the faster they solve the puzzles, she’s sent us cursed gold and if we don’t solve the puzzles in time we’ll be locked in school forever) definitely got them excited to get started on the puzzles!
One thing I’d do different:
- Give them a checklist-The Breakouts were set up with half the clues and puzzles locked in their Breakout box and half hidden throughout their work area. To successfully open the Breakout box and get the rest of their clues, they needed to find all the hidden clues/tools and figure out which clues worked together to open the first Breakout box. In hindsight, it would have been helpful to give them a checklist of clues/items they needed to locate in their zone so they would know when they were done searching and could focus on solving their first puzzle/riddle.
Overall, this was such an amazing and fun day! The kids loved it and they really blew us away with how well they worked together. Plus, it was great to see their faces light up when they were able to access their prior learning to solve the puzzles and put it all together. I would definitely do this one again next year and will absolutely be making more of my own Breakouts to use in the future.
Librarian On The Loose 