Digital Escape Room through Google Forms

Has the craze of escape rooms hit your school yet? We started using them for STAAR review last school year and they were a hit. Even if the challenges were something the students would do in a station or as an assignment, suddenly putting it into an escape room made it fun and exciting.

There are a few ways to do escape rooms. On my campus, we've used Notebook from Outlook to "lock" pages and Google Forms available on Google Drive. Even if you have a paper escape room, it is possible to add questions, or question numbers to a google form to have students verify answers and codes themselves.

It is pretty easy to set up on Google Drive. I have some screenshots below to show how to require students to input a specific answer before they can move on to the next question.

1. Start a new Google Form in Google Drive. 

2. Type in the title and the question. Change the answer type to short answer. 

3. In the bottom right hand corner of the question, there are 3 dots. Click on it and select "Response Validation". Also make sure to select "Required" so students can't skip the question. 

4. Once you turn on "Response Validation" several option come up. The one I use most often is to select "Number" and "Equal To". I have also used "Text" but since the option is "Contains" it is possible that if a student puts in ABCD but the answer is really BCD, google will say it is correct because their answer contained the correct one. There are ways around it, but using numbers causes less errors. 

5. Put in the correct answer and type in your Custom Error Text. If you don't type in a custom message, the students might not know they need to fix their answer. 

Continue adding questions. You can actually type in all the questions with open-ended responses or just put the question numbers and the correct answers and students fill in from there. 

I'll share some more ideas for Escape Rooms in another post--like what type of activities make good escape rooms!

If you are interested in some pre-made escape rooms, I have some in my TPT Store here.