Texas Mathematics Teacher Fall/Winter 2022 - 7

Teacher Candidates Create Digital Escape Rooms
for Mathematics Application in Virtual Classrooms
Lauren E. Burrow
For fall 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, my
public university's education studies department opted to
deliver all teacher preparation courses online. Prior to the
COVID-19 pandemic, teacher candidates (TCs) co-enrolled
in my writing methods and field experience courses often
completed community-based Service-Learning (S-L)
projects in partnership with the local elementary schools
they were interning at. Knowing that the sudden and
drastic pivot to fully online learning and interning was
not what most of my TCs were expecting or hoping for
as they prepared for their future careers in education, I
set to work to figure out a substitute S-L project that was
not constricted by virtual spaces and might be enhanced
because it required technology to complete it. It was my
hope that the Digital Math Escape Rooms project would
provide the TCs with the opportunity to practice their
academic skills, give back a valuable activity for their
mentor teachers' use, and even demonstrate to them that
there actually are some benefits to education restricted to
virtual spaces. This article demonstrates the S-L project
for other teacher educators and classroom teachers by
describing the content and process of TC-created, mathfocused
escape rooms for use by elementary school
students. This S-L project was a creative,hands-on
interdisciplinary application of math knowledge and
creative writing skills that could be completed or used
by teachers, TCs, and even young students living and
learning in digital environments.
The Service-Learning Project
The term Service-Learning describes a method in which
students learn and develop skills through service that
meets a community need; the goals of S-L include
increase of participants' civic responsibility, academic
curriculum enhancement, and participant growth due
to critical reflection on the service experience (National
and Community Service Trust Act of 1993). For this S-L
project, TCs were asked to use PowerPoint, Google Slides,
or Google Forms to create a math-focused digital escape
room that would help students in their assigned mentor
teacher's third or fifth grade classrooms practice recently
learned math knowledge and skills in an interactive game
format. A digital escape room uses technology to present
a story with puzzles to solve or tasks to complete in order
to advance throughout the game. TCs were advised that
the Digital Math Escape Room S-L project should utilize
technology to amplify learning opportunities but not let
the technology get in the way of the learning (in other
words: game workability and math content over " bells
and whistles " technology tricks). The project required TCs
to integrate math knowledge, creative writing skills, and
technology capabilities they were learning throughout
multiple courses and their own experiences as
online students.
Escape Room Creation and Content
Prior to COVID-19, my classes participated in in-person
escape rooms at the local library They had to journey
through multiple rooms to solve puzzles, riddles, and
challenges as a team in order to " break out " of a final
locked room within a pre-set time limit. The in-person
experience often grew our class " community " through
collaborative competition and kicked off the semesters'
expectations of rigorous critical thinking through game
play. For practical purposes, classroom teachers often
cannot implement large-scale escape room models like the
library's, so they could take the form of " breakout boxes "
- a physical or electronic box that presents students with
a series of content-focused " tasks in order to [break into]
a box with multiple locks " (Eddy, Pratt, and Martinez,
2020, p. 38). For this project, TCs created Google- or
PowerPoint-based files in which " slides " acted as
" rooms " for students to advance through by solving math
problems featuring recently learned content aligned with
grade-level TEKS. To introduce the escape room project
during COVID-19, I allowed TCs to try out a digital
escape room I had created for my son's coronavirusquarantined
birthday and then provided them with an
instructional overview video in which I talked through
my creation process and lessons learned when my family
played the game. Tips that I offered included logistical
suggestions like embedding instructional mini-videos
and online mini-games so that young students were kept
in the project without sending them to external sites and
conducting " trial runs " to ensure easy-to-find and easyto-use
navigation buttons for seamless advancement
through slides. Additionally, I encouraged TCs to consider
student-friendly themes to promote project interest and
storyline familiarity. Finally, to increase their background
knowledge for digital escape room creation I linked TCs to
tips from Bespoke ELA's blog post " How to Build a Digital
Escape Room Using Google Forms "
(https://tinyurl.com/w3y3ka2) and created a crowdsourced
list of YouTube videos they could watch based on
their specific creator questions.
www.tctmonline.org
Fall/Winter 2022 | 7
https://tinyurl.com/w3y3ka2 https://www.tctmonline.org/
Texas Mathematics Teacher Fall/Winter 2022

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