School Break aims to explore the possibilities of school students learning through playing and designing escape room game experiences. Two objectives will be reached by that a) learning of content in a variety of curriculum contexts, and b) developing connected cross-curricula skills. We will take a three-phase approach, providing detailed frameworks and toolkits for each stage (IO1). First supporting teachers to integrate pre-designed escape rooms (IO2), then helping them design their own rooms, and finally providing support for them to use an escape room design pedagogy in their classrooms. These three approaches will be developed and evaluated in practice (IO3). The project will mainly take place in secondary schools, and each partner will focus on a particular subject area - among others: citizenship and economics education, maths, life skills (e.g. cultural awareness and entrepreneurship), geography and environmental issues, arts and media, digital literacy. The main results also referring to the three IOs of SB are: 1) Frameworks i.e. a cascading framework for the educational production and usage of escape room type learning tools based on a systematic analysis to structure the different project outcomes and to guide educators: a) to integrate the escape rooms developed by SB into class, b) to develop escape room themselves, and c) to have students create escape rooms in class; 2) Escape room exemplars i.e. the development of escape rooms for different school subjects on different levels in different form (from digital to literal rooms) in different languages (relates to a); 3) School Break in Practice i.e. testing, usage and detailed evaluation of the frameworks and the escape rooms in (secondary) schools, i.e. in relation to a) integration, b) development, and c) student creation.
SchoolBreak's main objective was to exploit the educational advantages of escape rooms. Escape rooms are a relatively new entertainment form in which small groups of players work together over a set time to solve puzzles - and escape a real life locked room. Educational advantages relate to their motivational impact (e.g. challenge, group work, competition, story immersion) and their educational methodology, partly based on cross-curricular skills (e.g. experiantial, problem-solving, cognitive activation). On this basis educational escape rooms (eER) can also be designed to meet specific curriculum goals. From this two partial objectives of SchoolBreak are derived: - providing easy to play educational escape rooms for different topics (taking into account the topical specializations of the partner organisations) - providing a framework for the usage and design of eERs by teachers and students - mainly for secunday education. On the project website - combined with additional information and resources - SchoolBreak offers a set of 25 eERs, plus 17 translations into other partner languages, plus 1 in an additional online-version. Also on the website SchoolBreak presents five manuals in five languages (English, German, Spanish, Italian, French): #1 Using escape rooms in teaching #2 Designing educational escape rooms (i.e. by teachers) #3 Learning through escape room design (i.e. by school students) #4 Puzzles and other things to unlock #5 Plot-Puzzle for Educational Escape Rooms Design Additionally introductory videos in German and Italian. SchoolBreak was heavily affected adversely by the covid-crisis. The original plan to work with school students became very difficult for most partners. If there was face-to-face teaching at all, externals were often not allowed to enter schools and most of all teachers set other priorities than testing new training methods. Therefore SchoolBreak targeted more teachers and teacher trainees and disseminated more via digial media. The extension of the project until Aug. 2021 did not change the situation significantly. Overall the outreach into schools was not as systematical as intended. In a number of international, national and regional workshops and courses more than 54.000 teachers and teacher trainees could be reached. The exploitation of results by the partners is going on this way also after the project lifetime.