You showed them that it’s ok to ask for help that it’s ok to admit you don’t always have all the answers.

You modeled resiliency and a refuse to give up. They solved something their teacher couldn’t.īut it’s deeper than that. Imagine their moment of glorious success. Students see things differently than adults something that has stumped us for hours takes a matter of seconds for them. Challenge them to help you complete the puzzles. You don’t have to struggle alone – share your plight with your students. You’re faced with a choice – put in effort to stretch your abilities to their fullest extent and grow your brain or email us for an answer (which is akin to flipping to the back of the textbook for the key.) Which would you prefer your students to do? Why do we not hold ourselves to that same standard? Words like rigor, growth mindset, resilience, and productive struggle thrown around as skills that students need to be successful in life, yet how often do we model this for our students? By not having access to an answer key, you are provided with a perfect opportunity to experience what a student feels when they first encounter a tough trigonometry problem. The “hidden curriculum” of soft skills is just as critical as the content we are mandated to teach. With the advent of the digital age, students have access to limitless amounts of information. In our opinion, this has gone on far too long. For the bulk of the history of education, teachers have been viewed as the keepers of knowledge or the sage on the stage. Why do we do this? Is it because we are evil and want you to suffer? Absolutely not – this is our contribution to the Breakout EDU mantra.

When we receive these messages, we provide additional prompts and hints, but refuse to provide answer keys. Multiple times a week, we receive emails, tweets, Facebook messages, and other assorted communication from teachers asking for an answer key to the Digital games. With the Breakout EDU Digital games, none of this is provided – everything is ready to go as soon as you enter the game. You need these in order to facilitate the game. It gives the lock combinations, printable materials, and the paths the students follow to solve the riddles. With a Breakout EDU game using the box, setup instructions are provided.

In this post and a follow up, we will examine these points and provide our response to them. As we have evolved, iterated, and learned from that initial article, two situations have been brought to our attention time and time again. As we have shared in this post from Ditch That Textbook blog, we are thrilled to have the chance to live this motto as the Breakout EDU Digital team (in which we adapt the mechanics of Breakout EDU into a digital format). Players have to solve riddles to unlock a locked box. The mantra of Breakout EDU is “It’s time for something different.” Breakout EDU is an immersive game-based platform that adapts the escape room concepts of problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration into an educational format. Students will have another chance to build a game in the spring, and this time we’ll open it up to physical or digital games…content or purpose to be determined. They are revising their games, testing them out on teachers and students at school, then submitting a final draft game. My students are excited to share their games via another teacher at the AVID National Conference in December. They have to experience the highs and lows themselves, without me stepping in to fix everything. – As hard as it is to step back as a game facilitator, it’s even harder to step back while students are designing and facilitating their own games. – Students quickly realized that creating critical thinking opportunities is significantly more difficult than critically thinking itself. In the future, we will build in a peer review process within the game design. – My students wished they had a chance to test out their games before their peers played.

The formal and informal debrief conversations brought out many great ideas and learning opportunities. V, this is hard!” during the game creation process, I’d be rich! I knew this process would be tough, but I didn’t anticipate how much we would all learn. If I had a dollar for every time a student said “Ms.

Student breakout edu answers