“From 4th to 10th of July, youth workers/volunteers from Estonia, Spain and Czech Republic came together between the forests of Brno to learn more about educational escape boxes. During the project, participants were introduced to the concept of breakout boxes, played through some already existing ones and even created some of their own.
The workshops of the project were a perfect balance between theory and practice with a common goal to gather ideas for implementing in the participants’ own professional and voluntary work.
From my own personal view, the project was a great success since I learnt so much about how to construct my own breakout boxes and how to bind the theory with my own ideas. Through the incredibly smooth and successful teamwork tasks, I also started to feel slightly more empowered and more confident in my teamwork skills.
As we spent so much time together, I also learnt a lot about the cultural differences of the participants’ countries – especially about Czech Republic since the project took place there. Overall I’m very satisfied with the outcomes of the project, as I now know a lot more about educational breakout boxes and I feel culturally more aware!”
Kai Budrikas
“When I applyed for the training course, I was eager to learn how to create and facilitate breakout boxes so I could make use of them in my language learning classes for fun, collaborative and engaging linguistic puzzles on the learned grammar and vocabulary topics.
Now I realise that breakout boxes are more than a set of puzzles. A great breakout box has an important story to tell and solving puzzles only leads the story forward, deeper engaging students into problem solving and learning something new about the topic. Even more important is the discussion that is generated by the story of the game. This is the time when students need to analyse the story, identify problems, share experiences and come up with practical solutions.
The time limit also proved that with a goal and plan in mind it’s possible to achieve a lot in a very short time span, which is very encouraging to know for starting any future projects.
So escape boxes really have the potential to engage higher level language students into applying a very complex set of skills by creating an authentic environment with meaningful purposes the target language could be used for problem-solving, discussing new ideas and possibly even debating.
This was my first time taking part in an Erasmus+ course, and having passed the course I was left with a huge sense of accomplishment – I had learned all the theoretical and practical steps for creating a breakout box and actually created one in less than a day!
The whole learning process itself was very enjoyable as everything from theory, practice, application, reflection and just building the whole group together was organised in a very logical and wise way, so that by the time we got to the application part I felt confident that we had acquired all the necessary tools for creating a breakout box on our own.
Even when the creation process itself challenged us as a team, it was very empowering to acknowledge that instead of focusing on flaws and fear of making more mistakes, it’s more important to keep the goal in mind, work out a draft of all the necessary pieces and just acknowledge their potential for improvement.
Having realised this as our situational context really washed away most of my doubts, making me think more clear and focused on the goal. This also made me enjoy teamwork and the creation process a lot more. It’s okay not to have a perfect plan from the start and have a messy creation process as long as you have a goal and have thought out all the steps to actually reach it.“
Sille Midt
“As this was my first training course and international project, I was a bit intimidated by the amount of information we had to prepare us for the upcoming week in Czech Republic. Most of the key concepts like facilitating, debriefing, breakout boxes and game-based learning were foreign to me.
As we slowly got introduced to the schedule and got familiarised with the other participants, I started to feel more comfortable and safer in the environment. I feel like this contributed a lot to my creativeness and knowledge retention as I felt secure enough to speak my thoughts and open up to people.
The programme was very well put together – we had a perfect balance between facilitation and game-based learning theory and practice. I really enjoyed how prototype breakout boxes were used as a learning tool for participants to learn mechanics and puzzles.
Groups also had to facilitate these boxes with a short preparation time, which made for a very interesting challenge. In my opinion, debriefing is the most important part of the whole method used – with those last discussions about the topic, you can impact so much and give an interesting perspective to the whole learning experience.”
Edith-Jane Veri
“I was happy to take part in the Breakout Box training course in Czech Republic. Before this project, I was a participant of “Critical Escape”, a project with similar activities where we were developing educational escape rooms.
My previous experience in creating escape rooms helped a lot in the creation of breakout boxes. I was familiar with the concept, so it helped me with feeling more comfortable with the creation and I was happy to help out other participants with my experience.
In general, the project turned out to be quite inspirational. Me and Edith are passionate about law and we had an opportunity to create a breakout box on that topic. In the future we might continue with our breakout box improvement and will facilitate a couple of games in schools.
I believe that breakout box concept is a great opportunity for youngsters to learn more about a specific topic in a fun and pleasant way. During the training course, participants tried several breakout boxes and got the overview on how to facilitate them.
My favourite part when playing a breakout box is the discussion part, when you analyse what has just happened in a game and have a small discussion about the topic of a box. Also, I like that boxes are quite small and easily transportable. That gives more flexibility and doesn’t burden the facilitator with taking a lot of heavy things when preparing to facilitate the box.
In general, I really enjoyed the training course, learned a lot of new ideas and got inspiration to proceed with creation of breakout boxes.”
Julia Divonina