Playful Learning conference and my escape room box

I went to the Playful Learning Conference last week, if I get around to it I might blog about the conference itself, but this post is a bit more specific!

I took my escape room box along with the materials for the library induction I've made set up and ran several iterations of it the first afternoon. It went down really well, everyone completed it in around 20-25 minutes (which fits my intended half hour induction!), and got some lovely responses from people - lots of positive vibes around using escape room ideas in education. I also played an escape room as part of the first evening social, and a lovely one put together by students one of the afternoon, so there was a bit of an escape room trend going on at the conference...

The pictures above are of some of the teams trying to solve the puzzles.

CLS Showcase and the escape room box

Table, boxes and kit ready for the start

The escape room induction had it's first outing today, not for "proper" students, but for (mainly) staff at Huddersfield Uni at the CLS (Computing and Library Service) Showcase, where we show off things that are going on in our service.

Lots of people came and had a go, either at the full induction puzzles, or at a subset of them, or just for a quick look. The few photos below are people actually using the boxes.

It seemed to go down really well, and I might make one or two tweaks based what I've seen today, but I think it is about ready to try with real students...

Quick update (23rd June)  - attendees voted for their favourite stand on the day and I won! So the escape room induction thingy was the "people's choice" :-)

A new box

Open wooden box

I said before I was looking for box options for escape room activities... well a local person, recommended by a colleague has just made one for me!

I've deliberately got it made quite large to give me as much flexibility as possible, but I think it will do a great job. It seems really robust (so with luck the students won't damage it!), gives me loads of space so I have flexibility in what I stick in each compartment (see below), and should allow me to put everything I need for an escape room induction or teaching session all in one place and carry it to the room I'll use.

So 4 internal compartments, plus internal extra space, and the main box can be locked too. So at least 5 puzzles in one box - more if I want to be creative with it ;-)

Can't wait to use it now...

Escape room boxes

Two stained wooden chests

One of the first things I've decided to think about for my escape room induction is the boxes! Which (lockable) boxes I use to put clues / materials into will influence the clues I use. So I want to decide early on what boxes I'll go for...
For the Lagadothon I used some very cheap toolboxes in various sizes, which allowed me to fit one box inside another. I quite liked this as a test of the idea as it made it fairly portable, but the smaller one didn't really fit a padlock on properly and they didn't look particularly good!
So I've bought a couple of other types of boxes to mess about with and try to see how they would work. The picture above is of the nicer looking ones! These are cheap pine boxes that I've varnished - I then added a hasp to each of them so I could use a padlock to lock each of them.
I think they look quite effective, but I'm slightly worried about the size of them! They are just right for putting A4 sheets of paper (and other stuff) inside, but I'm not sure how practical these sort of boxes will be if I need to lead students to solve 4 or 5 clues during the escape room induction...
So I'm still looking for other options, one of which might be similar to the box below!

Box from the Legend of Neb-Senu containing various compartments

I saw this at the recent Counterplay conference and thought it was a brilliant idea - designed to be a self contained set of puzzles to be used in schools, they created this box containing a series of compartments. If I can get someone to build something similar for a price I can afford, this might be what I go with!
I'll then make sure each of my puzzles fits nicely into the compartments...