by Carla Pfahl
Quick Summary
Martha Riel, Branch Manager, and Amy Oelkers, Youth Services Librarian, with Oakdale Library, Washington County Library System, talked about their experiences putting together four different “Escape the Room” programs for elementary and middle school children.
Martha Riel, Branch Manager, and Amy Oelkers, Youth Services Librarian, with Oakdale Library, Washington County Library System, talked about their experiences putting together four different “Escape the Room” programs for elementary and middle school children.
With each Escape Room program Martha and Amy put together they say they have learned from the previous one that generate new ideas for the next one. Each had their own theme with props and clues.
Their first Escape Room program used the full library and was an after-hours program. The theme was time periods in history: Prehistoric, Egypt, Rome, and Middle Ages. The second was titled “Dr. Eye-nstein’s Lair”. The third was designed for elementary-level kids and was STEM focused with older teens acting as guides. Their last Escape Room just concluded and was a Halloween theme.
What they learned from their programs so far is that it’s important to have all kids participate. They found that having 4 tracks per game with 5 kids per track (20 kids total) was a good size and all kids were able to participate. Other tips they shared about the adventurous programs were:
- Test the game ahead of time to get rid of ambiguous clues and to make sure kids can do it in the time allowed
- It takes 2 people to run the program
- They found 8 clues per track was a good amount, depending on how hard you make the clues
- Balance the long clues with simpler ones
- Vary the types of clues and skill levels so more kids can participate
- Having the last clue be collaborative made the teams have to wait for the other teams so they could work together. Each team had a piece of the clue that they all had to put together to solve
- Lighting makes the atmosphere
- Having the programs be afterhours and on Fridays encouraged kids to sign up and gave them the space they needed to run the program.
- Have the program run about 1 ½ hours in length with the 15 minutes reserved for going over the rules
- Don’t spend a lot of money on props. Use things from home, second-hand stores, IKEA! You can hollow out an old dictionary to hide a key.
- Explore ideas from Pinterest “escape room” and other resources such as Lock, paper, scissors; breakoutedu.com; n.e.r.d. – new escape rooms design, Inc.; Time Trap; Party Games Plus; look at what other libraries have done and posted online – Harry Potter Escape Room (Wichita Falls Public Library)
They have had a lot of fun creating the programs and exploring what others have done as well. Check out the Washington County Library website to see what Escape Room programs they have coming up.
