We've started creating an escape game with a group of Spanish teachers. The project is far from finished, but I wanted to share with you some of the methods and tools we used. A sort of appetiser before the main course.

As part of our partnership with Euroglocal Belgium that I had the pleasure of contributing to the creation of this escape game. Or, at least, in the early stages of its creation. We worked in exactly the same way as I do on the Escape Games online workshops for teachers.

Design Thinking to create a relevant escape game

As with our courses and training, we have used Design Thinking for:

• understand the needs of our audience (in this case, students at a Spanish school)
• determine our educational objectives
• find relevant educational activities
• test the game with a representative panel of the target audience
• put the game online and distribute it under free licence

Emotions in the art of Pablo Picasso

The difficulty with this exercise was that the four teachers in the group taught to varying degrees:

• two of them work at the nursery school
• the other two in secondary education, but one as a guidance specialist, the other as a remedial teacher

It's hard to find a common playground. So we did a little brainstorming. I used a mind map and we very quickly came up with a cross-curricular solution: an escape game about emotions in the art of Pablo Picasso. For four teachers from an Andalusian school, it was almost predictable 😉

One of the teachers took to the game and recorded the entire workshop (5 half-days) using mind maps.

Designing a game path with a concept map

The aim is to help pupils from nursery to the end of secondary school to identify their emotions, recognise them in works of art and express them in their own way.

But we couldn't offer the same content or the same exercises to pupils at different levels. So we had to design a particularly complex game.

The solution? A concept map, of course!

As we Were already using Mindomo for the other mind maps in the course, we chose to continue with the creation of our concept map.

On this map, you can see a number of things:

• On the left is a fragment of the concept map we use to structure the course. You can see that it is subdivided into three levels and four different puzzles depending on the age of the pupils.
• then it comes together in a single ‘piece’, in reality a Genially slide that we use as a support for the online game.
• To the right of Room 1 Sadness, you'll see a note-shaped icon and an FMA logo. The icon refers to the note that appears on the right of the screenshot: it includes the theme of the room (sad), the name of the work (the old blind guitarist) and a reproduction of this work, which will be the central illustration of this room in the museum. Below the illustration is a link to Free Music Archive (FMA), the royalty-free music site
• we needed a piece of broken glass at one point in the game: we used the BBC sound bank, which is free for educational use and currently contains over 33,000 different sounds.

This is one of the many advantages of the Mindomo concept map:

not only can you structure documents, game routes, etc., but you can also store links to the documents, videos or audio files you need to create the escape game. Which means that, when you get down to creating the game, you have everything at hand: no need to do all your research on the Web!

Genially as a support for the escape game

Genially is an inexpensive and highly effective solution for supporting games on the web. It's the equivalent of the board. It also has the advantage of being highly intuitive. Finally, it comes with a host of tools such as timers, counters, dice and so on. All very useful things for a game.

A quick reminder: an escape game, as its name suggests, is a game. So it has to be playable. If it doesn't give participants the impression that they're playing, if it doesn't give them pleasure, it becomes a tedium, a poorly disguised school chore. The use of game mechanics - surprise, suspense, challenges, humour, dynamics, etc. - is essential for a relevant result! This is what researchers also recalled in their study of escape games.

A wink at the start of the game

For our escape game, we used the Genially Museum Escape Room model. As you can see from the illustration below, we modified it slightly. The door that has obviously been added in the centre leads to the video at the bottom of this article.

En cliquant sur la flèche vers le bas, vous passez à la salle suivante. Là, Paul – le sujet de la toile Paul en costume d’Arlequin de Picasso – appelle à l’aide dans une vidéo. Cette animation de la peinture a été réalisée avec D-ID AI Avatars inclus dans Canva for Education. Nous avons découpé le visage de Paul, nous l’avons téléchargé dans Canva et nous y avons ajouté une voix espagnole (Mimi).

Le but du jeu est de retrouver Paul perdu dans le musée. Chaque salle abrite une série d’épreuves à résoudre afin de parvenir à la dernière salle.

In the tests we've already completed, there's a jigsaw puzzle to complete. We created it using the Jigsawplanet application, which I have already mentioned in this article. We have created four different puzzles, one for each degree, as set out in the concept map. Each puzzle has a password. You have to give the password to move on to the next page. The image shows Paul painted as Harlequin, the character you'll have to find at the end of the escape game.

In the video below, you can see the last room in the game, where Paul is hiding. The teachers asked me to present the game to their colleagues to encourage them to take part. I was happy to do so. But in English, as my Spanish is pretty rusty.

The virtual room was created with Canva AI of Canva for Work. The bluish appearance was then obtained using a filter in the image editor.

As I said at the outset, this is a complex project. It is far from finished. But the teachers have promised to keep me informed of developments. Of course, I'll also keep you informed of the progress of this escape game in future articles.

Free competition: how many times does the word ‘game’ appear in this article? In French? And in English?

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