Confession: I’ve been following the BreakoutEdu craze on social media. Full Disclosure: I didn’t get it. I was skeptical. Locks? Huh?
So I stuck with it. I looked at challenges, I watched videos, and I joined the BreakoutEdu group on Facebook. I saw someone write about using disappearing ink to reveal a clue. That was it. Something clicked and I became a huge fan. Teamwork? Critical thinking? Problem solving? Creativity? Win, all the way around. Give kids a chance to be a spy, or Inspector Gadget, or the problem solver you know they can be!
And then I read about Michael Medvinsky using the game with first graders to unlock an extra recess. And I may have hugged my BreakoutEdu kit, right there at my desk. Once again, I had underestimated the power of a tool to be integrated at the youngest levels of learners… of course! Imagination, play, and collaboration? That screams elementary!
Challenges can be about anything. They can be imaginary, real, challenging, silly. They’ll force that beautiful kind of collaboration because students are challenged to get the locks open and every lock counts. For the youngest learners, I’d start out with something simple, involving simple challenges to solve to get codes. Then? You could amp up the game by tying the challenge to something real, involving a suitcase full of artifacts about an author being studied or famous historical figures, like Lewis and Clark.
To get started, try a challenge, or “game” that’s already written. Once you get a feel for the game, figure out how to make it fit for your own students. Work in some authentic skills like these:
Measurement: Use math skills like measurement, area, and perimeter to lead to codes. Finding the perimeter of a table in the classroom that is 46 might be the first two digits in the code. Careful measuring would be a must! And kids would have to rely on each other to check their work. Find the average height of the drinking fountains in the school, the median number of blue chairs per classroom in your gradelevel. It could get really complicated… and that’s why I love it.
Scientific Discovery: Incorporate an experiment with data to collect or a concept you can put a number spin on. What if you had a few substances that were numbered and you wanted students to determine their density in ranking order? Give each substance a number and the density order could reveal a code.
Skype or Google Hangout: What if you have another class to connect with and students must call and ask about a clue? Even better, have a few classes and make the students work together to figure out who to call. This reminds me of the old “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego game?” 
What if your class’s ability to Breakout hinged upon getting clues from other classes? Instant global collaboration!
Money: What if students had to add up a pile of money to determine an amount and that was the combination. $12.34 could be 1234. Fun way to practice and they could work in teams to check each other’s math. Mix the coins up and make the challenge harder by saying, “Add the nickels.”
Maps / Google Earth: Creating a Map in Google Earth and hiding a clue or code on a pin somewhere on the Earth. Pin lots of things so the students will have to search the world via clues and work together. You could even have different maps that have to be “unlocked” via a password. Weebly or Blogger could be used to create a simple password protected post, and the link could be placed in the post.
There are locks that have letters, words, directional combinations, and easy websites to set up like Weebly and Blogger to get started if you want to have password protected pages. QR codes could be hidden in places around the classroom and scanning the codes could reveal a clue or a combination. Once you start thinking about it, there are lots of ways to turn your classroom into parts of the game.
As as I hum that 80s Breakout tune in my head one more time, I imagine that I’d really like to hide the code on top of a high shelf so that students have to use a camera drone to take a picture to recover it, and there would be some kind of lock on the box the drone is inside, because it’d be fun to watch them figure that out. And I feel like I should end this post with an evil laugh. And it makes me like this game even more.
Most of all? It’s about struggle in learning. Struggle is fun, exhausting, exhilarating, and it’s good practice for us to step out of kids way, allow them to rely on themselves and their classmates, and make things happen. You might just break out of your teaching routine with this game… and that pun was completely intended.