Digital Escape Room Puzzle Ideas

 I have been a fan of digital escape rooms in the classroom for a couple of years now. I like creating them and consider them a useful tool for review at the end of a unit. They also work very well for me as emergency subplans - students will be engaged and doing something worthwhile and I do not have to worry about setting things up, making copies or really anything else, other than assigning them in Google classroom.

All of this being said, I'm always on the hunt for puzzle ideas. For starters in order to keep it fresh, I do like to be able to challenge them with puzzles that they have not seen before. While they are always different because of content, there are only so many times that you can present a maze, clock or 4 x 4 grid.:

 

On the other, some of my students have figured out that if a code is only four letters and those letters repeat in a "clue item" they can pretty much spend their time guessing. In order to eliminate that, I do like to use substitution cyphers which do present a bit more of a challenge:

      

But again, these end up being overused in many escape rooms. If you are looking for some ways to create that your students may have not seen and/or that present a bit more of a challenge, I suggest:

Rebus Generator - This site generates a combination of emojis and letters for you that you can just screenshot and paste into a slide show. You just type your phrase and done. The one below, for example, says "Escape rooms are cool.":

On the same site as the Rebus above, there is also a maze creator that allows you to type a phrase and create a maze with it. That can be used to pose a question or give a clue to students.

Vigenere Squares - I got this spreadsheet template from lockpaperscissors. I love it because it is a spreadsheet template so modifications are easy and are always in my drive.

Online encoders: For encoding in a variety of ways, like morse code, I like Cryptii.com because I do not have to worry about creating an account or bother with adds. 

Learningapps: While this site is intended to create minigames, I often use it in my escape rooms since you can create an activity within it, and use what they call "Feedback" to provide an encoded message. For example, in this very simple camouflage or mimicry sort, the kids receive a message "encoded" with Cryptii in Morse Code.

Another example is this crossword whose answers reveal a scrambled word that should then be unscrambled and used as a code.

What other ideas do you have for your digital escape rooms? I'd love to hear about them :)

Distance learning made "easy" with Formative

A while back I shared 8 Reasons to Love GoFormative. All of what I mentioned back then still holds true, but in this new era of remote teaching, GoFormative has become the most powerful tool in my teaching arsenal. Let me share why.

It is important to note that some of the awesome things I'll be sharing are available to premium/partner users. However also important to state that GoFormative is offering access to their premium features for those facing school closures and that any premium features you use during this time remain active in your Formatives even if later you downgrade to a free plan.

GoFormative and Google Classroom

 GoFormative "talks" to Google Classroom. There is nothing worse than trying to introduce a new tool to students. That initial walk-through of setting up student accounts, having students remember passwords, etc is a pain even in the best of times. GoFormative allows you to import your classes, assign work and pass back scores to Google classroom. Students do not have to do anything other than click on the assignment in their Google classroom, log in to GoFormative using their Google credentials and get to the actual work at hand.

Everything in One Place

This is the best part. GoFormative allows you to embed practically anything directly into your formative assignment. What this means is that you can have a full lesson on Formative that starts with a screencast or video, then a simulation, followed by a slideshow and a Quizziz, all in one place. No need for students to open up new tabs or get lost while trying to remember where to go.

Last week I was tasked to give a PD on using GoFormative for distance learning and created this slideshow walking you through what I consider the best things to embed for distance learning.



And just to be clear, embedding is not a premium feature. It is always available as a stand-alone embed, though as a premium partner you can embed directly into a question type.

And while we are on the subject of embedding, if you embed a Google document using the "second way" mentioned above, and give editing rights to the document to your students, you can effectively transform that document into a discussion board that the students can type into while still in GoFormative!

Of course, if you want to close the "discussion board" you simply change the permissions of the document back to anyone with the link can view.

Real-Time feedback

Once students are working in your Formative, you can give feedback in real-time or asynchronously.  This GoFormative article shows you how. Now, while in a Google meet (or Zoom), you can also choose to display the student answers, hiding their names (which is an actual feature in GoFrmative) and have a full discussion about their answers.

Formative Library

If you don't know where to start or just want to find something quickly, GoFormative also has a library of teacher-created Formatives shared by teachers that can help pave the way to your use of GoFormative during this time.

Some more information about the use of GoFormative during school closures, including a recording of a webinar that walks you through setting everything up can be found in their article "COVID-19 Virtual Classroom Action Plan"

This is how GoFormative has made my transition to remote teaching easy. How about you, what tools are you using and found especially powerful during these times?

Biogeochemical Cycles Digital Dice Games

During my career as a middle school teacher, I've made use of a number of biogeochemical cycle dice games that are readily available in several variations on the internet. A couple of days ago, as I was bringing the illustrated dice I had for the water cycle, I thought that this would be the last year I could use that particular set - they were a little crumpled from handling and the pictures had faded. While creating the dice is not hard, I was a little unmotivated to do it and wondered whether there was another way to still use the activity but save me the work of recreating the dice every so often.

It has now been several days, but I did it! A digital version of the water cycle dice game.




Now, of course, this would not be the way to show it to students, so I posted it up for actual use on a Google site, with a link to a record sheet -

Biogeochemical Cycles Dice Games

Not being able to stop myself at just the water cycle, I then went ahead and created a page and "game" for all other cycle games I use. 

• Carbon - both pre and post-industrial revolution
• Nitrogen
• Phosphorus
• Rock

I purposely re-used the illustrations to give students an idea of the similar reservoirs for matter as it cycles through on Earth and to allow for easy comparison between the cycles.

After playing any of the games, you could have students write stories or draw cartoons with the information they gathered or discuss how difficult/easy it is for a molecule to leave a specific reservoir. If they play more than one, they can also compare their journeys in both (which reservoirs are present in two or more, which processes are similar, etc.)

I would love to hear more ideas about what you could do with them.

Declutter your district Gmail

Having a district Google account has many benefits. From single sign-on to sharing documents with students and using Google classroom, it provides many opportunities for collaboration and communication, which makes it an invaluable tool. However, dealing with the e-mail attached to that account has always been a nightmare for me. That e-mail account is clogged with newsletters from different vendors and notifications of shared documents from students to the point of making it completely useless. In the past, this has not been a problem since my district was also using an LMS  which made it easy for me to bypass the use of that Gmail. However, it looks like it may no longer be the case, so I needed to find a way to make that Gmail account work more efficiently for me, and the answer was not as difficult as I thought it would be. It all relies on filtering your e-mails.

Filtering the vendors

1. Click on any e-mail you receive from a vendor to open it

2. Click on the three little dots at the top right of the message to open the "more" menu and select "filter messages like this"

3. On the screen that opens, select "Create Filter" and then choose what you want to do with those e-mails.

Filtering the invitations to edit

This was my biggest issue. No matter how many times I've asked my 240 stduents that when they share something with me (which I do want, of course) they should "skip sending a notification", they almost never do - that requires paying attention to details, which is not their forte. So on any given day, I would get hundreds of "____ has shared a document" e-mails. Filtering those was not as straightforward since the option to "filter messages like this" is not available. However, it can also be done.

1. Open your Gmail. Click on the Gear icon and then on Settings.

2. Select Filters and Blocked Addresses

3. Scroll down until you see Create a New Filter

4. In the box that appears, create the filter

5. Once you click continue, select what you want the filter to do and then click "create filter"

I selected "skip the inbox" for these types of e-mails just in case something gets filtered that I then need to go back to at some point. These e-mails will never make it to your inbox so if you ever need to see them, you will need to click on "more" on the left side of the screen, and then on "all e-mail".

It is important to note that all these filters you created do not necessarily apply retroactively. Anything received before you created the filter will still appear in your inbox unless you do something about it. However, anything new will be filtered according to the rules you just created.

So there it is. I hope you find this useful and if you have other tips I'd love to hear about them. On to teaching students about the wonder of BCC and never using "reply all".

Boss Battles with Google Forms and Sheets - An Update

I spent most of the last summer creating Boss Battles for my gamified classroom. Throughout the school year, I also shared with you a couple of tweaks I made to those original sheets, adding "first hit and first perfect hit", and then adding "shiny bosses".  My students really got into this whole idea of battling the bosses and I was really happy with the excitement they generated.

A couple of days ago, I began the painstaking process of clearing all of this work out in preparation for the new school year. While I would have loved to use them as they are, they no longer fit the game narrative that I am exploring for the upcoming year, plus, I reused Bosses across my grade levels. While this may not be a problem for most teachers, it is for me because I loop the students, so most of them would be re-battling the same bosses they already know. Perhaps they would not remember, but all it would take is one of them to check their student sheets (where the bosses are displayed), and the excitement of getting collecting the boss would be diminished. 

With all of this in mind, I started creating new bosses - we will be rescuing scientists - and clearing out the old forms/sheets tweaking the originals a bit, which is what I am sharing today.

Boss Battle Form (will auto copy)  - I have dummy-filled it with some data so that it is easier to explain. If you make a copy simply delete all the prefilled contents of "form responses 1"

Boss Sheet

While it looks basically the same, there are important things to note. 

• Column L contains each of the Boss possibilities. Each is its own drawing (published to the web) and placed into the cell using 

=image("published address of your google drawing")

You may be tempted to make use of the new "insert image in cell" function. Don't. You will be calling the images into the boss battle pane and into the scores sheet. Google Sheets does not recognize images insterted that way as actual objects so until they fix that what will happen is that you get blank instead of the image you want to display.

•  Cell F15 now contains a new formula:

=index('Form Responses 1'!$B:$B, match(true,isnumber(search("/",'Form Responses 1'!$A:$A)),""))

This formula looks at the timestamp looking for the first appearance of the slash symbol (/) in Form Responses 1 column A and reports the  matching contents of column B in the same sheet. This formula solves the problem of having to change cell references as the sheet is populated the first time around.

• Cell F16 contains a similar formula:

=index('Form Responses 1'!$B:$B, match(true, 'Form Responses 1'!$C:$C=12, 0))

In this case, it matches the contents in column B with the first time the "perfect score" of 12 is achieved, and of course that can be changed to whatever number you is your "perfect score". 

Perfect Sheet

That sheet simply reports the contents of first hit and first perfect hit and assigns them a value. I bring that into my leaderboard using the Vlookup function as a way to give students an added incentive.
Formula that imports this into your leaderboard:

=IFERROR(VLOOKUP(A17,IMPORTRANGE("Boss Battle Google Sheet Identifier","Perfect!A:B"),2,0), 0)

Where the number 2 is the column number where those "extra points" are housed.
If you are interested in the Vlookup formula as it pertains to the leaderboard, visit my post "Assign XP automatically using Vlookup - Google Sheets"

Scores Sheet - AKA Where the magic happens

As originally, this is a pivot table that aggregates the data generated first by adding all the scores each student generates (Column B - Sum of Scores) and then by reporting the maximum score the student obtained (Column C - Max Score).

Column D (Counts the number of times a student achieved a Perfect Score)

I've been toying with the idea of having students "catch/rescue the Bosses". This collecting of the bosses had a great impact in engaging students to attempt the quizzes multiple times throughout a semester, regardless of whether it is an official Boss Battle day with the whole display of the Boss. In order to achieve this assigning of bosses I first needed to know how many times a student scored a perfect score. To do this, I added a Calculated Field to my Pivot Table:

If you click anywhere inside the already populated pivot table, the Pivot Table Editor opens. This already had the score summarization by SUM and by MAX.

The Times Perfect Score was added using by clicking Add values and selecting "calculated field". The formula is simply a COUNTIF, though you notice that the normal use of the quotations is eliminated.

=COUNTIF (Score, 12)

The number 12 obviously corresponds to the "perfect score" in this particular case and could be changed to whatever suits your needs.

If you are recreating your own, also make sure that you select Summarize by Custom and Show as Default.

That got me the number of times a student got a perfect score. You may be wondering why this was important. The answer is that I did not want to give out the Boss simply based on the number of points. My students are notorious for finding the easy way out and often would rather take a quiz 100 times scoring 1 each time than getting 100 the first time.

Column F (Where the Shiny Bosses come in)

With that number of "perfect scores" aggregated by student, it was time to move on to the "catching/rescuing" of the boss.

When working to pivot tables, you can still add formulas to the columns that are not being used by the pivot table itself. I added a title to Column F and called it boss obtained. To give the illusion of randomness to the catch, I decided on the following formula

=IF(D2>=10, Boss!$L$9, IF (AND(D2=9), Boss!$L$8, IF (AND(D2<=8,D2>=6),Boss!$L$9, IF (AND(D2<=5,D2>=1),Boss!$L$8," "))))

which gives the Boss in Cell L9 or L8 of the Boss sheet depending on the number of perfect scores. You would think that you could use the RAND (random) function, but unfortunately, it is what is called a volatile function, which means it refreshes each time and I did not want students to have a new boss catch simply by opening the sheet.

The formula is just copy/pasted down through the sheet so that each row gets its own student reference. The results of this column are again imported to my Leaderboard using VLOOKUP as mentioned in Perfect Sheet above. The key here is to remember that VLOOKUP references the column number:

=IFERROR(VLOOKUP(A2,IMPORTRANGE("your sheet identifier","scores!$A$2:F"),6,0), 0)

where the initial A2 - is what it is looking for (e-mail of my student),

"scores!$A$2:F"- the sheet and range where the data is housed

6 - really column F where the bosses caught were "assigned"

Column E - Maximum Possible Score: the end to "grinding"

Last year, some of my students greatly inflated their leaderboard standing by retaking boss battles over and over again. While in principle this would be OK with me, there is a point where enough is enough. I know that I can simply close the form, but that leaves the student who may need the extra practice out of the loop, and opening and closing a form manually means that I must remember to do so. Taking this into consideration, I opted for writing in a formula that reports a set number of points out to my leaderboard (again with the VLOOKUP formula) to my leaderboard once the maximum is reached.

=if (B2>40, 40, B2)

Looking at the formula, it simply reads if the contents of cell B2 (where the scores are added is greater than 40, report 40, otherwise report the number present in cell B2. The formula is copied down Column E.

That is it for today. I hope this inspires you to keep working on your leaderboards and perhaps make some additions or modifications. And as always a big shout-out to Mr. Powley who although has moved on to standards-based grading and may be letting go of the Dread Sheets inspired this whole Boss Battle process.

Embed a Live Google Slide into a Google Doc

This post falls under the "How did I not know this before" category...

Over the last few days, I have been updating my 8th-grade waves unit and will be using this performance task I found online. As I was working, I was going back and forth between the document and a slide deck "template" that I want students to use as a guide to organizing their work. My students tend to lose track of things so this was my way of ensuring that once they got to the end of the task they had everything they needed. Anyway, long story short I placed the document, which is rather long, into my preferred delivery site (WIX) and embedded the slide deck but was not particularly satisfied with the way it looked. I needed side by side and rather specific placements.
I definitely did not want to just give access to the slide deck since I know that my students would just make a copy of the template and use that instead of going through the instructions. I also did not want to add all the instructions to the slide deck. So then I decided that I wanted to add the slide deck to the instructions document.

I know that I could take a screenshot of the slides I wanted to reference and then link them, but while searching I came across the absolute easiest way of doing this:

How to Embed a Google Slide Into a Google Doc

1. Open your Google slide deck.

2. From the left side panel, click and select the slide you want to add to your Google doc. Go up to Menu and select Edit > Copy.

3. Open the Google Doc where you want your slide to be. Place your cursor in the location in the document where you want to add the slide.

4. Go up to the menu and select Edit > Paste. 

5. Choose "Link to presentation" to make it an active link.

Google docs will treat this as any other image, so you can resize, add borders, crop to shape or whatever you want. The absolute beauty of this is that the link not only directs the user (my students) to the specific slide, but also any changes made to the slide in the slide deck are updated in the doc by just clicking on update. You can see how this worked in the document I was talking about before:

I am thinking that this little trick can be used for hyperdocs, instructables or even lab reports. What do you think. What other uses do you see?

Reviewing Content with Shiny Bosses

By far, the greatest successful addition to my game this year was the Boss Battles. Piloted at the end of last year, and fully implemented this year, I've even had students present this form of testing during Student Exhibition Nights. This boggles my mind since the Boss Battles are in reality nothing more than the normal tests and quizzes I would normally have, but as we all know, beating the Boss, and even better, adding each to our collection of "perfect bosses", is so much better than simply taking a test.

My boss battles have undergone a couple of minor tweaks over the course of the year, with the addition of the first hit and first perfect hit, and Google Sheet's new (to me) shuffle question order, but other than that they have remained the same as when I first created them. 

With CASP dates approaching, I started to think about pulling questions from this already created "bank" of questions to create new battles for review. However, I did not love this idea simply because, I did not think this far along in the school year when I set up the individual student sheets, and thus did not leave myself extra places for more than a couple extra bosses. The other issue I had was that each unit is tied to a race of aliens we encounter through our narrative so it would not make much sense for a "robot" boss (matter) to suddenly ask questions about earth systems, for example. 

I was pondering this one morning while on my daily Pokemon Go walk (yes, I still play) when the idea to make shiny bosses came. If you are unfamiliar with the term, a shiny Pokemon is a variant of a regular Pokemon that has a slightly different coloration. It does not give anything new out nor does it have any special attacks, it is simply different. So I set about trying to figure out how to make that happen without having to recreate (copy) a multitude of forms and sheets and do a bunch of work with changing cell references in my evergrowing leaderboard. Most importantly, I did not want to touch the student ranking sheets. So here goes - Fullscreen link

If you are presenting the shiny boss battles as a stand-alone thing for review, you are done, but if like me, you were already pulling data into your leaderboard, you will need to make some other adjustments. 

 As with most of the gamification set-up tasks, the joy for you may be in creating the first shiny boss, and the rest of the process may become tedious, but remember, once done you do not have to do anything other than enjoy your students as they confront the shiny boss. As you see below, the figuring things out ends up being done by Google Sheets so there is no time wasted in looking up individual students to see if they got the shiny boss or not.

What do you think? Any other ideas to make review a part of your game or narrative? I'd love to hear about them.

Experience Points for Student Goal Setting

A couple of days ago, I posted about using forms and sheets for student reflections. As I was pushing it out to students, I started thinking about how to make it easy for me to assign XP and leveled badges for its use. Ideally, I would have some sort of automation that:

1. Allowed me to see students' latest goal without having to open each individual spreadsheet, and
2. Assigned XP and badges automatically.

Students latest goals:

I created a new spreadsheet, copy pasted my roster in column A, and used the importrange formula to bring the timestamp and goal from each individual grade reflection Goal sheet. For example:

=IMPORTRANGE("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/180ZOz9vkPq20ZDKy3KJUN--gVpWP6TABFKzk-hSxW5Q/edit#gid=168726689", "Goals!$A$3:$B$3")

Where:

•  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/180ZOz9vkPq20ZDKy3KJUN--gVpWP6TABFKzk-hSxW5Q/edit#gid=168726689" is the URL of the individual grade sheet
• Goals is the name of the sheet I am bringing over
• $A$3:$B$3 is the cell reference for time stamp and goal

Painstaking in that you do have to change each cell reference, but you only have to do this during set up. It is worth noting that when you do this the first time, you will probably get an error telling you that you need to grant permission. Just click on the cell and allow access. Also note that the sorting by timestamp was already done in their individual sheets as explained under Form Responses 2 in my previous post.

Automatically assign XP for goals

This portion of the post assumes that you are already using spreadsheets to house your leaderboard, and works with any version you may have created. If you are looking for one, I offer mine, Mr. Matera's or Mr. Powley's.

As we all know, the faster XP are show/given out, the better. This posed a problem for the assigning of XP for this activity since nothing would replace the student/teacher conferencing about their goals or the student actually reflecting on them. However, I figured that if I could at least give out points and badges for some measure of completion, I could always go back and make time for those conversations. As I toyed with how to do this, I thought about making sure that some specific words were included, but quickly gave up on that simply because my list of possibilities grew rather quickly. I settled instead for a simple word count and figured that 30 words at a minimum per goal are sufficient. Letting Google spreadsheets do the work for me, I added a hidden spreadsheet to the grade reflection spreadsheet template I shared before. When you make your own copy of that document, simply unhide it

As displayed when unhidden, this sheet is simply the place where the counting and calculation of XP happens and can be modified to suit your needs.

With that in place, it is back to the leaderboard page, where you would need to decide where you would like to maintain the information and when to assign badges. 

The formula used to bring the XP from the student grade reflection sheet to the corresponding cell in your leaderboard is:

=IMPORTRANGE("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/180ZOz9vkPq20ZDKy3KJUN--gVpWP6TABFKzk-hSxW5Q/edit#gid=168726689", "Wordcount!C2")

As before, each spreadsheet reference is unique to the student grade reflection sheet, so it needs to be manually changed and the spreadsheets need to be linked.

Finally, the awarding of badges is done using the techniques described in my Leaderboard and Badges post, using a conditional formula that awards badges according to the total points accumulated from the word count.

And the badges are displayed on the individual student sheets which feed from the leaderboard as explained in this post.

In an ideal world, the badges would only be assigned if the student actually met the goal they set for themselves, but that is a conundrum that I have yet to solve. Perhaps you have some ideas?