How to Use Riddle Rooms to Gamify Lessons

You’ve heard of escape rooms, but have you heard of riddle rooms? It’s my way of gamifying the curriculum. Students tend to love anything that’s gamified. We’ve become “edutainers” by making lessons and activities engaging and fun for our students. It’s like hiding zucchini in your brownie recipe—make something fun and also have it be good for them.

Using Google Slides, I start by asking the students a riddle on the first slide. I hyperlink a Google Doc or Kami file so that students can keep track of the letters they need to solve the answer to the riddle. Sometimes the answer to the riddle is one word, sometimes it’s a series of words. Then I ask multiple choice questions. and when the students click the wrong answer, they’re prompted to go back and try again. If they get the right answer, they get one of the letters that they need to solve the riddle.

All of the riddle rooms that I discuss below will be included in a document for your reference at the end of this article.

Riddle Rooms GIVE STUDEnTS IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK

You know the expression “Practice makes perfect”? Well, I disagree. Practice makes permanent. Students complete an assignment or homework and then hand it in. If a student didn’t understand the concept, they may have just practiced it incorrectly, instilling the wrong concepts or process into their memory. By the time you’ve graded and returned the work, the class may be a couple of lessons further along, and your student didn’t build the proper foundation for the concept. It’s hard to go back and reteach or undo what they just practiced.

However, with riddle rooms, students get immediate feedback because they’re self-checking their work. They know immediately if their answers are wrong, and they can stop right there to clarify any misunderstandings. I like to add information or hints on the “try again” page to support students in developing an understanding of the topic. Having students stare at a blank page that they don’t understand wouldn’t be productive, and it can be difficult to walk around the room to support so many students who may have different questions. By providing information on the “try again” page, you embed support for your students’ success.

In a bats-themed riddle room, for example, students read a book on bats and then answered questions. A video of the book was embedded as a resource, but images from the book were added to the “try again” pages so that students could learn the content and then go back to answer the question correctly.

Riddle rooms can also help students focus and prevent them from being overwhelmed. With only one question on a page, riddle rooms help students focus on just that question, chunking the assignment, so that they don’t have to manage visually busy and long worksheets.

Riddle Rooms are Effective Tools for Differentiation

It’s quite easy to differentiate the riddle rooms for students’ varying needs in your class. Once you have the riddle room complete, make a copy of it and make the changes you need for certain students.

One way to modify the assignment is to reduce the number of choices. In a simpler riddle room, you can offer only two answer choices or make it a yes/no or true/false question, which is simpler than completing a checklist in class. Instead of reducing answer choices, you could also reduce the number of questions for students. Conversely, make enrichment activities by scaffolding questions, adding challenging questions, or giving more answer choices.

Another way you can modify the riddle rooms is by using videos. In a kitchen safety-themed riddle room that I made for a middle school family and consumer science class, I embedded videos for the students to watch in order to answer the questions. When inserting YouTube videos, you can edit the start and stop times of the videos if you only need a clip. You can also record your own videos of a science experiment, math question, world languages, and more.

Some of the older students were solving the riddle after the first few letters, so I made it more challenging by giving them the letters out of order.

Riddle Rooms Support Self-Paced Learning

Riddle rooms are great tools to use for reviewing for a test, extra practice, fast-finishers, blended learning, or even flipping your classroom. They can be used over and over again, whereas you’ll only get one use out of paper-and-pencil worksheets. You can add notes into the slide deck for students to copy into their notebook when they get the right answer. 

Riddle rooms are also beneficial for students who are absent, frequently leaving the room for support, or using them in stations. In a “What Is a Fossil” riddle room that I created for third grade, students get the video chunked into manageable sections, another copy of the video on the “try again” page, and notes for them to copy into their notebook.

If you’re worried about accountability, you can hyperlink a Google Form worksheet or open the slides in Kami, where students write out their answers or show their work. App smashing is a great way to do this. Any application that uses answer explanations can be turned into a riddle room. 

Create Riddle Rooms With Classroom-Ready Templates

Want to get started, but don’t know how or don’t have the time to create one on your own? I’m happy to share this resource that contains all of my templates. All you have to do is click the forced copy link, type in your questions and answers—and all of the hyperlinking is already done for you!

There are templates for all subjects, grade levels, and seasons. Look at the different tabs on the template page for tutorials, scavenger hunts, and additional information.

When you’re ready to post the riddle room to your learning management system (LMS), be sure to use the “present mode” link in Google Slides. To do that, in the URL, delete the word “edit” and everything to the right and replace it with the word “present.” So you would change this URL: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q4daHAeJRmJ8zr521TMmfCvIYns_ktzw-4SVsJNLyW8/edit?slide=id.p#slide=id.p to: ​​https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q4daHAeJRmJ8zr521TMmfCvIYns_ktzw-4SVsJNLyW8/present.

This puts the slides into present mode, but students still have access to the tabs if they’re using other websites or Google Docs or Kami to keep track of the clues. If you’re using Google Classroom, be sure not to post the link as an attached link because it will revert back to edit mode. Paste the link in the directions you give to your students.

I have several video tutorials on YouTube that you can view for further instruction on how to create riddle rooms, including linking in Google Forms to record student answers as well as editing and assigning riddle rooms to your LMS.

Riddle rooms are a great tool to engage students, provide immediate feedback, and have some fun in the classroom.