EVO 2019 ELT Escape Room Week 3: Puzzles and Ciphers

Escape Room ELT
Online Meeting 3 – 27th January
Puzzles, Codes and Cipher Ideas for ELT Escape Rooms
graham.stanley@gmail.com https://escaperoomelt.wordpress.com

Part 1 Puzzles
What is a puzzle?
Can you list some of the
different types of puzzle?
Have you ever used puzzles
for language learning?

Beware of the man,
be he friend or brother,
whose hair is one colour
and beard another.

Suspect
5781
Suspect
3467
Suspect
2974
Suspect
6754

Aha! Puzzles vs process puzzles
https://thecodex.ca/puzzles-aha-vs-process
• puzzles that lead to that “Aha!” Moment – when you finally get a
flash of inspiration that helps you solve a puzzle
e.g. riddle, figuring out a pattern or a sequence, connecting the
relationship between two unrelated objects
• Process puzzles are those you know you have to solve and "you just have
to put in the work to complete“
e.g. jigsaw puzzles, math problems, sudoku puzzles, mazes, basic
ciphers, algebra, logic deduction problems, searching for hidden objects

Puzzle design for ELT escape rooms
• Rule 1: Puzzles Should Be Fair – You are on the Player’s Side
• Rule 2: Clue Everything and Remove Ambiguities – Don’t Make Players Guess
• Rule 3: A Puzzle Should Have One Answer
• Rule 4: A Puzzle Should Have a Self Validating Answer
• Rule 5: Clues and Puzzles Should Be Clearly Linked
• Rule 6: Aha! Correlations Should Make Sense
• Rule 7: A Puzzle Should Not Take More than 5 minutes to Complete
• Rule 8: Tedious Work Should Not be Ambiguous on Instruction
• Rule 9: Puzzles Should Have No Destroyable States
• Rule 10: Puzzles Should Have Feedback
• Rule 11: Your Puzzles Should Be Consistent – Follow Patterns You Set
• Rule 12: Your Puzzles will be too hard – Beta Test and Iterate
• Rule 13: Basic Rules
• Rule 14: Language should usually be the focus of the puzzle
• Rule 15: Non-language puzzles should be easy to complete
https://escaperoomelt.wordpress.com/puzzle-design-in-escape-rooms

• Rule 1: Puzzles Should Be Fair – You are on the Player’s Side
You should want players to solve your puzzles and not take delight in
their failure to do so.
Especially in ELT Escape Rooms, puzzles shouldn’t be so difficult that
they take too much time to solve, or (worse) players can’t solve them.
If puzzles are challenging or players have problems, offer hints.

• Rule 2: Clue Everything and Remove Ambiguities – Don’t Make
Players Guess
Don’t asume it’s obvious – give clues and don’t leave it ambiguous as to
what a player has to do with the information he/she finds
See Scott Nicholson (2016) Ask Why: Creating a Better Player
Experience Through Environmental Storyttelling and Consistency in
Escape Room Design http://scottnicholson.com/pubs/askwhy.pdf

• Rule 3: A Puzzle Should Have One Answer
“Players tend to go down rabbit trails: they will find an incorrect theory
and expand on this theory until they are so far down the rong path they
may as well be playing a different game. However, if your clues point
them in that direction, then it’s not their fault.”
There should be one answer to a puzzle and it should be clear.

• Rule 4: A Puzzle Should Have a Self Validating Answer
When players solve a puzzle, they should be confident they have the
correct answer.

• Rule 5: Clues and Puzzles Should Be Clearly Linked
It should be obvious when players find a clue that it is linked to a
particular puzle. This is easy with linear Escape Room Design (bottom
left), but more difficult when your room is non-linear (bottom-right)

• Rule 6: Aha! Correlations Should Make Sense
“The majority of Aha! puzzles have to do with correlation.”
Help players with that moment when they get a flash of inspiration that
helps them solve the puzle by making it clear that a clue connects to a
puzzle

• Rule 7: A Puzzle Should Not Take More than 5 minutes to Complete
5 minutes per puzzle has become an accepted rule in the Escape Room
community
It could be argued that 5 minutes is too long with an ELT puzzle unless
the focus of the puzzle is on language (see rules 14 and 15)

• Rule 8: Tedious Work Should Not be Ambiguous on Instruction
If you want players to do something that will take a long time to
process, make sure it is clear what they have to do so they don’t spend
a long time doing something that is of no value to escaping the room.
Even better, with ELT Escape Rooms, avoid this type of puzzle

• Rule 9: Puzzles Should Have No Destroyable States
“In an escape room, you don’t want to design a puzzle where crucial
elements to solving the puzzle can disappear.”

• Rule 10: Puzzles Should Have Feedback
Players need to know when they have correctly solved a puzzle or if
they need to try again.
Combinations on locks are obvious (i.e. the lock opens or it doesn’t),
but other puzzles are not so obvious.
You could play an applause sound when the players solve something.

• Rule 11: Your Puzzles Should Be Consistent – Follow Patterns You Set
Do not mislead players and be consistent in your puzzle design. When
you give Information to players, they should be able to trust it.
You need to be consistent especially when you design multi-part
puzzles.

• Rule 12: Your Puzzles will be too hard – Beta Test and Iterate
You may think a puzzle is easy – it is likely to be harder than you think.
Try puzzles out on colleagues, family and friends before using them
with students – if your players are new to escape rooms, they will find
the puzzles difficult.
If you are told a puzzle doesn’t work, then remove it or change it.

• Rule 13: Basic Rules
• No red herrings
• No outside knowledge (make an exception for ELT Escape Rooms?)
• No spelling or grammar mistakes (another exception for ELT?)
• Puzzles should be solvable without requiring hints (Exception for ELT?)

• Rule 14: Language should usually be the focus of the puzzle
1) "rotate the dial
to 30 on the left,
unless the dial is
green, in which
case you must first
rotate the dial to
number 15 on the
right“
2) "open the
lock on the
door with a
star that
doesn't go"

• Rule 15: Non-language puzzles should be easy to complete
Sometimes you will want non-language puzzles in your escape room –
your theme might demand it or you want to provide variety, but don’t
make them too difficult. e.g. the jigsaw below.
The jigsaw has the combination for a lock,
But how long would students take to complete
it? And what language would they be using?

• Advice given by Brett on the #Education thread of the Escape Room
Enthusiasts secret chat in Slack
“If the goal of the game is to motivate a student to learn English, the
implicit type is probably a better fit. Explicit-type puzzles are likely to
feel more like homework, which is a problem in general with
"educational" escapes. Ideally the educational part is a side-effect of
the gameplay, not the focus. Otherwise you can end up with the
opposite problem to what you describe, a room that is educational but
not much fun.“
https://escaperooms.slack.com

• Advice given by Brett on the #Education thread of the Escape Room
Enthusiasts secret chat in Slack
“Many (probably most) of the educational escape games I've seen focus
too much on using bits of knowledge as answers (something like "1492"
as the combination for a lock that was supposedly used by Columbus),
turning a large portion of the games into trivia contests or math
problem sets. It is an easy and natural thing to do if you don't have a lot
of experience making puzzles, but I think there are better ways to work
learning into puzzles.”
https://escaperooms.slack.com

Part 2
Codes and Ciphers
What is a cipher?
What is the difference
between cipher and
code?
Can you list some of
the different types of
cipher?
Have you ever used
ciphers for language
learning?

Codes vs Ciphers
A code operates on
semantics, meaning. A
code requires a codebook
where words or phrases
are assigned other
meanings.
A cipher does not involve
meaning – it operates on
syntax, symbols. Ciphers
are usually performed on
individual or small chunks
of letters.
https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-
science/cryptography/ciphers/a/ciphers-vs-codes

There is an art to sending coded messages
and there is also long tradition of using coded messages in
ELT. Here are some ideas of how you can use them in class:
Secret Code game
Teaching languages with ciphers
Secret Code
Secret Messages
Cryptography as a teaching tool
Cryptology for Kids
Codes and Ciphers
https://wordpress.com/page/escaperoomelt.wordpress.com/109

#jackboom
and
the bomb
An example ELT Escape Room
cipher activity for Advanced learners

The city is being terrorised by
#jackboom, a deranged explosives
expert who delights in setting
booby-trapped bombs.
You are the city’s crack anti-
explosive team and are called by
the police to the 42nd floor of a
high-rise building to defuse the
latest bomb that #jackboom has
planted.

A red and blue wire leads from the mechanism to the bomb. The
countdown has not started yet, but the clock shows less than a
minute is left before it the bomb will explode.
The mechanism on the bomb that #jackboom planted looks simple
enough. There is a timer – it looks like when it reaches 00:00:00 the
bomb will explode.

On the back of the bomb there is a keypad where you can input
numbers and then press ‘Enter’. The keypad won’t accept letters.
Next to the keypad are four symbols and spaces below where the
numbers appear when you enter them. Do you recognise all of the
symbols?

Suddenly the count
down starts and the
picture disappears.
You have less than a
minute to go before
the bomb explodes.
What number do
you key in?

#jackboom
and
the bomb
Suggested follow-up activities:
• Role-play debrief to pólice chief
• Write a report of the incident
• You capture #jackboom – interrogate
him

EVO 2019 ELT Escape Room Week 3: Puzzles and Ciphers

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