Create Your Own PBL Experience with Breakout EDU

Michelle Hollander
Content and Curriculum Lead at Teq
Author

Imagine students creating an interactive story, complete with hidden clues, digital locks, and embedded videos! They might be on a mission to Mars, decoding critical communication messages, or perhaps they're designing their own intricate puzzles for a class escape room. With Breakout EDU, all of this is not just possible—it's fun and intuitive too!

Breakout EDU is an interactive platform that helps students unlock a love for learning by applying knowledge with higher order thinking, developing growth mindset, and encouraging perseverance in an engaging way.

All of this can come together and embed itself within your next Project-Based Learning (PBL) initiative. 

Flexible Options

Set-up is both customizable and adaptable. The locks, themselves, can be sequential, one leading to another, but they don’t have to be! You can choose to have non-sequential locks that can be opened in any order! Plus, lock types include text, numbers, shapes, colors, and even directions. You can also add “non-lock” content, such as videos, audio, or PDF documents. This content can further allow students to tell an interactive story by providing background information, context, additional clues, or other narrative elements.

The great thing about Breakout EDU is that it can be used for any topic or content, thereby providing a toolkit for promoting authentic, student-centered learning and assessment. Students have the ability to design physical, kit-based games, or work completely digitally. Students can also work simultaneously or you can set-up stations. 

This unique flexibility enables Breakout EDU to therefore embed itself into your PBL projects in a variety of different ways. 

Design Thinking

Working through the creation of a Breakout EDU game also follows the Engineering Design Process. Students start out by doing some research, whether that be on using the Game Design Studio within Breakout EDU, exploring the elements that make for a compelling game, and/or on the topic or theme their puzzles focus on. From there, students should do some planning. Rubrics and templates are provided to further guide this process.

The platform helps develop brainstorming and planning with templates and Game Design Strategies – implementing transferable skills like organization, creativity, and critical thinking.

After going through the brainstorming process, students then move onto the design and construction phase, where they actually go ahead and build their breakout experience. However, the process doesn’t stop there! Even after “completing” their game, students should evaluate it by testing and revising for any errors, playability, etc. before sharing out their final product. 

Additional Ways to Incorporate Breakout EDU

Even if your PBL capstone project isn’t based around Breakout EDU, itself, that doesn’t mean you cannot still use it. The platform can be intertwined into the research phase of any project to help familiarize students with background content and information in a captivating way. 

Breakout EDU is the ultimate tool for transforming Project-Based Learning (PBL) and STEM experiences, interweaving the engineering design process with interdisciplinary content and skills. Imagine students incorporating this platform into their own adventures and having the tools to not only solve puzzles, but create their own! 

Practice skills with Breakout EDU and iBlocks from Teq!

Breakout EDU can be integrated with many PBL programs, and Teq’s iBlocks has a specific topic – Designing an Escape room – that includes it. 

If you want to see all of this in action, check out the Breakout EDU sessions on OTIS for educators. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get designing! We can’t wait to hear about what you create!