BreakOut EDU: Stimulating Students' Thinking

BreakOut EDU offers curriculum related challenges for students, staff, or general team building.  The basic objective is to figure out clues and solve puzzles so you can open the box locked with several locks. Instead of purchasing a kit from them, I followed their guide to purchase materials to put together my own.  

Students working a lock to see if they solved the puzzle correctly.

I reviewed the activity options, chose one to fit my needs, set up the challenge, introduced the concept to the students, and let them have at it.  Students were highly engaged, had fun with the puzzles and clues, and felt the excitement of the timer ticking away.

The benefits of BreakOut EDU are that students have fun, practice critical thinking, enhance their skills working as a member of a team, and can even review some content. We definitely have to work in some more break outs!

Student reactions to participating in the experience follow:

• I liked this activity because it was something we’ve never done before, and it was challenging, and I like to be challenged.
• The timer made some people panic, and so they didn’t think clearly.  Other than that it was really good.
• Breakout was a challenging activity with clues and locks and problem solving.  Indeed it was hard.  It was a very fun activity that I would recommend to a a lot of people that like spy related things.  You really get the experiences that you’re actually under pressure.
• The Breakout activity was very engaging and thoughtful.
• The experience was fun.  We put our heads together and got as far as we could.
• This experience helped me work on my teamwork skills.  Also, I got to have fun while working on something that challenged me as an individual.
• It was fun to use skills from past experiences.
• This was a fun way to build our teamwork skills and remember what we learned in sixth grade. The challenge got us to problem solve.
• I think that it was fun and mysterious and also challenging.
• The experience was fun to work together and solve the puzzles to open the locks in a certain amount of time. The only problem was that we weren’t always listening to each other.

If you have used BreakOut EDU or other challenges to enhance students’ experiences or, if this post has generated some thoughts of your own, please share in the comments. I would appreciate hearing about them.