I've seen people talk about digital escape rooms and decided I wanted to attempt to make one! I decided this would be a fun way for students (and teachers) to learn or remind themselves about Google Classroom and how they will be using it this school year.
I will share the escape room with you all, but I thought I would also take this time to explain how to make an escape room because if you are comfortable with hyperlinks in Google Slides you can handle making one.
Google Slides is always my go-to, but this could also be done in Google Forms by using the option to go to a certain question based on the student's response. When using slides, you can choose to make all of your slides first and then hyperlink them or hyperlink them as you go. If you choose to hyperlink them as you go and you link to another slide, it will always go to that exact slide no matter if you add new slides or change the order of the slides.
I tried about 50 times to type out directions and tips for creating this, but decided it would be WAY easier to use videos to actually show you how to do some of the steps. Now I have to admit, I'm still working on my speaking skills in Screencastify. I like to trip over my words and I sometimes make mistakes, but rather than recording myself 10 times, I just leave them in there and you all can appreciate that I am human. (this is something you should do with your kids too, nothing has to be perfect!)
Creating hyperlinks:
An escape room is FULL of hyperlinks. You can hyperlink text, text box, shape, or image. You can link these to a website by copying and pasting the URL or you can link to another slide in the presentation.
Advancing to a specific slide:
When I created my escape room, I wanted the students to click in a specific location to move forward in the challenge. This video will show you how you can create shapes with hyperlinks so that if they click in the correct place it will advance them to the next part of the challenge, but if they click in the wrong spot it will take them to a try again slide.
Landing slides for wrong choices:
In my escape room, I wanted to have it set up so that if the kids click in a place that is not correct, it will take them to a landing page that lets them know they got it wrong and they can go back and try again. This video will show you how to do that. I want to point out that you will need this landing slide for EACH of your tasks in the escape room.
So now here it is! Here is my Google Classroom Escape Room. This is the first one that I have built so it isn't super fancy. I used a simple word scramble as the "challenge" portion to escape. You can choose to have it timed or untimed. Click on the link below to get your copy!
Nice! Good luck with new projects!
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