This summer I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to take part in the training course “Breakout” in Borgo Incoronata (Italy), after being away from the Erasmus+ world for what felt like an eternity.
The topic of the project? Creating and testing portable educational escape rooms. I’ve been working as a social studies and history teacher for three years, and one of the most difficult yet most motivating parts of my profession is inventing and finding new creative ways to make my subjects come to life, make more sense and inspire students to learn more about it.
I’ve never been good at puzzles or games myself, so on my own I’d never have thought that an escape room is something that could be used in a formal classroom. After a week of pretty intense workshops I can honestly say that my own prejudices were wrong.
I hadn’t taken part in any escape room before, but during the training course we had the chance to test a portable escape room created in a similar project, and have an idea of what it could look like. Then we created our own portable escape room specifically to be used in classrooms with a 45 minute lesson, and we tested it with our group.
What did I get out of this experience that seems like a week’s worth of “just playing“? A decent portable escape room about mental health that I can (and will) use in my lessons; three other escape rooms that I can also modify and use with my students in order to make their educational road more interactive and positively challenging; more confidence, encouragement and inspiration for combining formal and non-formal learning, reducing the fear of falling behind in the national learning curriculum; new ideas and know-hows for creating my own educational games, and a desire to visit some escape rooms, too!
Even though the days were filled with hard work, the evenings were filled with fun, everchanging social activities. It is always enlightening to interact with people from different cultural backrounds- even more interesting to meet with youth workers and educators from different countries. To learn how educational systems work in different EU countries and how teachers solve problems and find solutions and what tools they use for it.
Besides broadening my horizons and making useful contacts during the beautiful evenings in the south of Italy, I now also have a toolkit with different riddles, energisers and team-building games that they don’t teach you at universities. Some of them I have already put to use in my everyday work.
Anna-Liisu Arukask
“Breakout” was a very cool experience. This training course opened to me the secrets of how educational escape rooms are created. Before that, I had experience in creating educational board games, but I never even thought that someday I would create my own escape room! It was very interesting and it opened up another incredible path for me to non formal education and information assimilation.
I met very interesting people with whom I was able to talk about deep, relevant and important topics for me. In general, I believe that Erasmus+ people are generally another kind of people on this planet… When you get on a project, you automatically land into an atmosphere of kindness, respect, mutual understanding, fun and trust. It is always very sad to part with people… especially if they are your people…
Upon arrival in Tallinn after our training course, for a whole week I imagined everything that was happening around me as an escape room. When I was sitting in a cafe, I noticed that there were three red chairs, four yellow and six blue, and my brain really started to think that this is a code and that it means something!
In general, I made a very cool trick for myself, and this is not only how to create educational escape rooms: I realized that I will now consider all the problem situations that I need to solve as an educational escape room I need to solve and take knowledge out of it!
Alesja Jagolnik
The main benefits from this training course were the different practical ways how I can teach difficult topics for young adults in an interesting and playful way.
At first I did not have a great understanding of portable escape rooms, but during the extensive course I gathered different practical experiences on how to make a portable and educational escape room and now I am planning to make and use the game in my classroom. The trainers were professional and really helpful, which made my experience even better.
In addition, the adventure of working in an international group of people gave me a new perspective on different issues of the world. Topics like migration, mental health, fake news, social media etc were all discussed. We got to play others’ games, which taught us a lot about their chosen topic, and gave us ideas on how to perfect our own game.
On top of everything, we got to experience Southern Italy at its finest. We had excellent tour guides and local facilitators who gave us the true taste of Italy!
I now feel confident in using educational escape rooms in a learning environment and I think it will be a great tool in my toolkit to use in my classroom.
Adele Teras