Anything but ordinary! Exciting classroom activities for end-of-year fun with Breakout EDU!

Anything but ordinary! Exciting classroom activities for end-of-year fun with Breakout EDU!

End the year with activities that will keep your students engaged.

As the school year inches to a close, a familiar feeling is sweeping classrooms across the country: the anticipation of summer break. Students (and teachers!) are eager to sleep in and enjoy long, relaxing days outdoors. We know it’s difficult to keep students engaged during these final weeks, yet it is also high-stakes. End-of-year assessments are on the horizon and, despite the bubbling excitement about summer, it’s important to maintain focus on learning and review. 

Breakout EDU is here to save the day! Our immersive learning games will transform any classroom into a thrilling escape room experience. Instead of competing with summer excitement, give students an experience they can’t ignore. Working with peers, students can collaborate on thrilling missions designed to reinforce learning, support critical thinking, and activate problem-solving skills. It’s the perfect tool to reinvigorate engagement and leave students with a positive and memorable learning experience as they head out the doors for summer break. 

The ultimate classroom experience

Culminating lessons do not need to consist solely of slide decks and review packets. Breakout EDU allows students to revisit key concepts and skills learned throughout the year in a fun, dynamic, and interactive way. 

Breakout EDU offers educators a robust library of ready-to-play digital games that can be customized to include vocabulary, key historical events, scientific principles or anything else teachers need to review. For those who enjoy the creative process, we also offer the Adobe Game Design Studio to build your own games from beginning to end - a perfect end-of-year project that can end with playing each other’s creations. And for the tactile-preferred learners, we also provide physical kit games to unpack and unlock adventure. 

Here are a few other reasons why Breakout EDU provides the ultimate end-of-year learning experience: 

• Collaboration and teamwork: Breakout EDU games are inherently collaborative. Students can work together in teams or small groups to solve the puzzles and breakout! This allows each individual within a group to leverage their unique strengths to help their team progress through the game. In this way, students build communication skills, trust, and social-emotional skills. 

• Critical thinking and problem-solving: Our games require students to think critically, analyze information, and approach problems from different angles. They have to rely on their grit and experience productive struggle alongside their classmates in order to succeed. Doing so not only reinforces critical thinking skills, it also activates prior knowledge and encourages them to synthesize information to make analytical connections across topics or content areas. 

Successfully completing a Breakout EDU game not only reinforces core concepts, it also gives students a nice confidence boost as they head into year-end testing and summer break. 

Create-your-own adventure

One of the things teachers love most about Breakout EDU is its versatility! Everyone can be a designer in the Adobe Game Design Studio. Students can let their imaginations soar and teachers can create games that are personalized to end-of-year learning goals, summative content review, and appeal to the unique learner strengths of their cohort. 

Designing a game requires deep thinking and engaging in complex problem-solving. The designer needs to consider goals, create rigorous challenges, and develop clues to tie it all together. The first step in the process is to use your imagination for an exciting storyline. The story should involve enough intrigue to activate students' curiosity to learn and inspire them to complete the challenge.

Here are a few content-friendly and fun ideas to help inspire creativity: 

• Social studies: Let students take on the role of time travelers! On their journey through time they can navigate historical events, solve problems faced by different civilizations, or even decipher ancient languages. What a great way to revisit key historical concepts within an engaging narrative!

• English language arts: Review the literary devices students learned this year by asking students to create games placed on a book the class read together. Or challenge them to think of an alternate storyline for the protagonist, dream up different challenges for the antagonist, or even restructure the characterization of all characters! This is a creative way to nurture a love of reading and support future authors while giving all students agency over their knowledge of literary concepts. 

• Mathematics: Students and teachers can serve up some real-world problems to solve with math! From calculating the volume of a pool to using equations to triangulate the location of a missing pirate treasure, there’s no problem that can’t be solved with a fun math adventure!

• Science: Earth science, biology, chemistry, physics - all disciplines of science can be built into a fun gaming experience with Breakout EDU. Challenge students to devise a way to launch into outer space, decipher clues hidden in periodic tables, or find repeating patterns in insect anatomy to help them breakout! 

Ready-set-go experiences

If a classroom is crunched for time, our growing library of digital games, that spans from full length 40-50 minutes games to 5-10 minute mini games called Lock of The Day, are ready to play with the click of a button. Here are a few of our current favorite full length games: 

• Field Day in the Forest (Grades 3-5): This game is perfect for celebrating the end of the school year with a virtual field day! The forest friends are gathering for their annual forest field day fun, but Penguin (who lives just a little bit south of the forest), and Hippo are visiting and they want to join in as well! Students will utilize their observation skills and critical thinking to complete challenges and unlock the “field day fun.”  

• Hidden Pattern Quest (Grades 6-8): Calling all gamers! Students can put themselves in the role of a gamer who discovers a hidden door and enters a portal with five secret levels. Now that they are in the game, they are stuck, until they finish the hidden pattern to locate the exit. 

• The Ringing Rascal (Grades K-2): What is happening in the neighborhood? Door bells are ringing all over town, but no one is ever there! Sleep is disrupted, game night is paused, and dinner is getting cold as the neighbors work together to solve the mystery of the ringing rascal!

Escape the ordinary

With Breakout EDU, learning doesn’t need to slow down because summer is around the corner. Take this as a unique opportunity to transform end-of-year review activities into engaging experiences designed to keep the excitement of learning going strong well into summer break. Use these games to review content, support teamwork, re-engage focus, and celebrate student achievements! 

Send your students into summer with a smile, a sense of accomplishment, and a thirst for knowledge that will stay with them long after the last school bell of the year rings. Click here for a free trial of Breakout EDU to get started today!