Librarians made Google Forms unlikely platform for virtual escape rooms

The day the Peters Township Public Library in McMurray, Pennsylvania was supposed to introduce a superhero-themed escape room, the library had to close its doors due to the coronavirus pandemic. Without a physical location to work, librarian Sydney Krawiec began to devise an alternative: a digital escape room created in Google Forms.

In the space of four hours, she made a Harry PotterThemed game that sent participants through a series of challenges based on locations from the book series, and they had to find their way out by solving puzzles. The Google form went viral. And after other librarians saw it, they decided to make their own.

Through these virtual escape rooms, librarians have been able to serve their communities, as well as those who live far from them, by giving people something to do while they are trapped in their homes. These digital challenges have become a tool for home teaching and education, librarians say, as well as a device for staff development and team building.

“I know there are a lot of parents, especially in the beginning when we all started working from home, who were overwhelmed by trying to find things to keep kids busy during the day or by preventing teens from just playing basic video games. day, “says Morgan Lockard, a librarian at the Campbell County Public Library in Kentucky, who has so far made five digital escape rooms.

Completing these games is like taking an online personality quiz, but with mixed puzzles. Solve a series of problems, ranging from mathematical equations to digital puzzles (usually via an external link), with descriptions that tell the story of what you’re seeing in these rooms as you progress through the game. The format is quite simple and straightforward: the pages will be decorated with a photo or video or two, some description, sometimes a link, plus a couple of questions with multiple choice answers or an answer field. There is an element that feels like an academic test: when you answer a question, you wait to see if you are wrong or correct. When you solve a riddle correctly, you get the satisfaction of going ahead and reading the next beat in the story.

Escape rooms have become increasingly popular in libraries in recent years. Krawiec had hosted two physical exams Harry Potterthemed escape rooms before she did the superhero game, and was even asked about doing these challenges in person as part of her library job interview. Many of the librarians who have been doing these Google Forms were also in charge of organizing the physics for children, adolescents and adults.

The digital format actually comes from an academic environment for Krawiec. He first did a Google Form escape room when he taught eighth grade math and algebra.

“I had a year-end review on Google Forms,” ​​she says. “That was a digital escape room, but it was based on Algebra 1 and people wanted to escape for various reasons.”

By going through the games, players develop their problem-solving and reading comprehension skills, says Brooke Windsor, a librarian at the Richmond Hill Public Library in Ontario. She has made several escape rooms, including some themes. Star Wars, Marvel superheroes and Jurassic world. In addition to honing those skills, problems and puzzles often involve geography or math.

“We still want to sneak into that learning, broccoli-style brownie,” says Windsor.

These activities provide a vehicle for teachers to engage students in different subjects. Lockard says his old Egypt-themed escape room is used in history classes, and his space is used by science teachers and Girl Scout groups.

Google Forms can also serve as a starting point for students to learn more. A guide to the Lockard Space Escape Room contains links for additional information and facts that students can search for. The game itself involves a bit of google on the part of the participant, who is meant to develop research skills.

Lockard says he tied his last fairytale-based escape room to his library’s summer reading program because these games can also be a way to encourage students to read. Windsor says she tries to base her challenges on books, like the Percy jackson series, for this reason.

“I know he is a very old librarian, but we are librarians,” says Windsor. “We are pushing our books and our literacy.”

There are, unsurprisingly, some drawbacks when translating escape rooms into digital format. Google Forms doesn’t save your progress, so if you accidentally close or walk away from the form, you should start the game from scratch. The answers are case sensitive, so participants should take this into account. Since the puzzles are often image-based, the activities may not be accessible to visually impaired people. Both Krawiec and Windsor say they worked with instructors who teach students with visual impairments to develop more accessible, non-image-dependent versions so that participants can solve the puzzles after listening to them through a screen reader. A text-based version of the Krawiec game is available on the Peters Township Public Library website.

Librarians are not alone in putting these kinds of challenges online. An escape room company, Puzzle Break, created two escape rooms that are completely virtual and can be played in a video call. Another company, The Escape Game, sends an employee who uses a camera to a physical escape room and has the players in a video call navigate them. The industry will suffer huge losses due to the pandemic: an escape room company can generate $ 125,000 in annual revenue, provided it is sold most weekends, according to a 2018 New York Times report.

But Google Forms has offered an easy way for people to do their own, and it’s not just librarians. Dave Murphy, a UK-based radio producer, has started his own quarantined digital escape room business, charging £ 8.99 for each game.

Cordelia Hsu, student and journalist, saw Krawiec’s challenge and decided to put her own together. Harry Potter Google Form escape room with your friend James Irvine. They held a competition between the Quidditch groups in Australia to see who could complete their game faster, which caught the attention of the teams in Germany and the United States.

“It is the first time I have tried something like this, and it was very satisfying,” says Hsu. “And it somehow challenged my brain in a way that my brain lacked that challenge during isolation.”

Windsor says escape rooms have also allowed librarians to reach more people than they expected. “It is not just our immediate community,” she says. “It is the world community. And I think if that is not the ultimate goal of library science, then nothing is. “