Game Night!

Creating the breakouts was fun for me! I love these types of puzzles, so it was fun to think about what I could put together. Gamifying lessons is not something I am a stranger to; I worked as an English teacher for teens in Spain and I found for many of my students, the only way I could get them to engage in the material was to gamify things (I made lots of Kahoots and Jeopardy boards). Getting all these resources for creating breakouts almost made me angry because I really wish I knew these existed when I was teaching. It would've made my life so much easier. I ended up choosing The Hunger Games as my topic since that is a book/movie I really love and because I had been thinking a lot about my teaching experience, where I did actually teach a unit on The Hunger Games. 

My biggest problem with creating the breakouts was that I decided I wanted the puzzles to feed into each other. Since it was brought up that there should be a purpose for each puzzle, I thought, "well, then wouldn't it be great if the answer to one puzzle would be integral to completing the next puzzle." This thought I immediately mentally committed to and became my near downfall, as it is much more difficult than just creating puzzles. Sure, I could make a million different puzzles, but how do I make them connect and how do I ensure there is some variety? I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this and am pretty happy with what I came up with. I think they lead into each other pretty well, although I do think the use of the cipher wheel for the double puzzle is a bit clunky. Imagining myself as a teenager completing these puzzles, I think I would find them fun and purposeful since there's a clear thread between them all. It's not a perfect match to my original vision, but I think it's still pretty compelling. 

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I wanted this to be potentially usable in the future if I ever want, so I put general instructions for the logic puzzle instead of giving exact answers, as I think you could adapt it to many different locks, which would make it usable for whatever the librarian has access to. Hopefully it's still easy to follow. 

I imagine this could be used in a school library setting if done in conjunction with the reading of The Hunger Games or as a teen trivia/game night in a public library. 

The double puzzle I made is below. Give it a try if you are familiar with The Hunger Games book or movie!