The Deeper Learning Puzzle Bus
A retrospective
Where it all started
Five years ago I started “locking” educators in a room filled with puzzles while I evaluated them from a shadowy corner. If that sounds sketchy to you, you probably have never been to an escape room. At this point, however, it’s unlikely you haven’t heard of one given their explosive popularity over the past few years (excluding the pandemic year). When I first embarked on this strange but pertinent learning journey with escape rooms, they were a pretty novel concept. When I initially learned about the concept, I immediately thought of old adventure computer games like Myst, where you were transported to a mysterious, eerie island filled with strange technology. In order to uncover Myst’s many mysteries, you had to solve a series of challenges that had you looking for items, solving puzzles, and navigating the ominous world. This is the basic premise of an escape room, except it’s not on a computer screen. Add a couple rooms filled with keys, locked doors, puzzles that have manipulatable tools and items, and BAM, you have a real life adventure game.
But what do escape rooms have to do with education? Like the digital adventure games that preceded them, they were created for entertainment value, but just as games and puzzles have been used in educational settings so too could escape rooms. I first came into the world of escape rooms by connecting with some friends at High Tech High in San Diego and at the Hewlett Foundation. At that point, we were thinking about three things that would end up being the foundation for our attempt to answer the initial question.
- How do we bring delight into the classroom, for students and teachers alike?
- What are the most critical skills a student will need to have to be tomorrow’s problem solvers?
- How the heck do you measure those skills?
With that framing, we saw that escape rooms had the potential to be so much more than just games (although that would most certainly check the delight factor). We saw escape rooms as ways for measuring academic skills — we saw them as tests! Yes, tests — those headache inducing activities you used to have stress dreams about back when you were in school. But unless you are claustrophobic, escape rooms probably don’t seem all that similar to a test.
I’m sure you can remember sitting in a cold classroom with sweaty hands at your lonely island desk; a bluebook, scantron sheet, and that infamous number 2 pencil staring back at you while the sound of your stomach’s growling announcing to anyone in a 5 mile radius that you had accidentally skipped breakfast. Escape rooms are quite the opposite of such tragic, but pervasive testing experiences. They are frenetic activities where friends/family/strangers run around a room, yelling out to each other for a three digit combination, and jumping for joy when they find that final elusive key. They are how we want education to feel — exciting, engaging, and joyful. In addition to being entertaining experiences, they can also provide actionable feedback about your performance, and knowledge.
Despite their fun façade, there is a lot going on behind the curtain. (Good) Escape rooms are intentionally designed to require collaboration, good communication, creative problem solving, and critical thinking. If you’re an educator, this might sound familiar: Those are what many refer to as 21st century skills, Deeper Learning Competencies, the 4C’s, soft skills (the list goes on). But more importantly escape rooms do two important things simultaneously — they foster these skills and measure them. Unlike the adventure game Myst where losing means you grew too frustrated to continue playing, escape rooms invoke the most classic challenge — the battle against time. In escape rooms, you have a time limit, and it’s this limited resource that turns an escape from a string of puzzles into an engaging and memorable experience.
EdEscape Rooms
Turns out, we weren’t the only one who saw the connection between escape rooms and their educational uses. Throughout the country educators were experimenting with class(escape)rooms for their students. We pulled together many of these teachers at conferences where I ran workshops that involved taking educators out to a local escape room and breaking down the different components of the experience. When we got back we designed and built mini escape rooms for other conference guests.
These workshops hit critical mass in 2017 at SXSW EDU when me and my colleagues Ariel Raz, Devon Young, Jessica Brown, Laura Mcbain, Marc Chun, and sam seidel ran one of these workshops. As usual, we were going to take a group of educators out and then reconvene at the conference in order to design puzzles using some cheap materials and gadgets I bought the night before at Goodwill. However, due to a mistake on the schedule, they turned our workshop into two, so when me and a dozen teachers came back from our escape room, we found a ballroom at the conference center filled with over 50 people and a line outside the door with about 75 more hopeful teachers trying to attend our session. Mind you, we had not planned or programmed any of this, so with some extreme facilitation we recruited our original dozen educators to lead mini workshops on their escape room experience, and invited the teachers waiting in line to return in a couple of hours for an “escape room(s) exhibition”. Unsurprisingly, our original group of teachers were quick to adapt and led the charge in developing what were some of the most clever and ingenious escape rooms I’d ever seen. I remember we had a group create their own “lockbox” by drilling a hole through an old book with a pen, and slapping a combination lock through it! As sophisticated as some escape rooms were, the craft of designing them lent well to the scrappy DIY ethos many educators have had to adopt given tight budgets and limited space and time.
In total we designed about six themed escape rooms in different corners of the ballroom. After two hours, we opened up the ballroom for guests to come experience the mini escape rooms. And to our surprise, we had another line out the door wrapping down two hallways of the conference center. We ended up going over by an hour because our teachers-turned-escape-room-designers were so committed to letting everyone in the line try one. From that experience, two things were clear: Teachers want this, and we need to get this to more of them. So we wondered, how might we bring the joy of escape rooms to more teachers?
The legend of a 1994 Chevy Box Truck AKA Junior AKA The Deeper Learning Puzzle Bus
Fast forward 10 months, I found myself at the Stanford d.school working on an emptied out delivery truck that had been retired from delivering Fritos (yes, the chips). My goal was simple but ambitious: Change the way educators think about assessment at the next SXSW EDU. I worked with researchers, assessment experts, and educators to devise a method to measure hard-to-measure skills like collaboration. For this paramount endeavor, I would use an escape room as the vehicle (both literally and figuratively). I spent two months building an escape room on a truck, and designing a set of tools that could be used to assess how teams collaborated and communicated. Enter the Deeper Learning Puzzle Bus, a mobile escape room used to rethink the way we assess students!
For those that didn’t get to experience the Deeper Learning Puzzle bus at any of the conferences, you get a sneak peek of the bus in this video.
The puzzle bus was intended to do three things: Start a new conversation on what assessment could be, provide a delightful learning experience for educators, and model how an escape room could be made in a classroom setting. And before you start thinking, “Maybe the Stanford d.school could fund something like this, but not at my school,” it might relieve you to know that excluding repairs on the truck and safety measures I had to make, all the puzzles inside the escape room cost me around 75 dollars. The majority of that was budgeted for combination locks and a high powered magnet, but the rest of the puzzles were used with everyday craft supplies you would find in any classroom. I also created a PDF with instructions on how to make 3 of the 4 puzzles found on the bus. You can find the link for the PDF on this resource page.
After prototyping on campus, our next stop was Austin, Texas! Working with the SXSW EDU team, we took over the park directly in front of the conference center where we set up tables and tents for groups to debrief, and reflect on the escape room experience. We had a sign up board for each day that would fill up within 5 minutes of us opening it up. We had a stream of educators funneling through the bus, filling the park with laughter as they got out, or had their time expire on them. Throughout all this I watched and observed students, school teams, and groups of strangers work together frantically to unlock the back door of the puzzle bus. Afterwards we had deep conversations about what the experience felt like, how hard collaboration actually was, and how few opportunities we afford our students to practice and improve at it. It was an exhausting two days of utter chaos and pure joy.
We didn’t end there, however, we headed out to the Deeper Learning Conference in San Diego immediately after, and a collection of schools throughout California in the months that followed. We didn’t just bring the puzzle bus to entertain, we designed an entire professional development workshop around it that would enable educators to think about, and discuss the state of education in regard to collaboration, assessment, creativity, and fun. We had a lot of these conversations, several hundred by my estimation. 2018 was the year of the Deeper Learning Puzzle Bus for me. The truck had become a mini celebrity in the education circle. I was once identified in Oakland in line for food at a museum. A woman gently tapped my shoulder and asked, “you’re the puzzle guy, aren’t you?” What had started as a whimsical, moonshot idea, had defined a large part of my career. But more importantly, the bus inspired a lot of educators to build (or have students build) their own escape room as a way to both integrate and measure collaboration and communication, and that is eternal.
What we learned along the way
Because of the extensive amount of testing this project yielded, we had multiple findings.
Although not a novel insight, the fact that so many different stakeholders are frustrated with standardized testing proved to be a useful way to have conversations about deeper learning. Although standardized testing may have its uses, it’s clear that it can be antithetical to quality deeper learning. This fact means that it’s very difficult to talk about measuring deeper learning competencies like collaboration without also addressing the negative impact of standardized testing. This insight led us to frame the deeper learning puzzle bus as an alternative form of testing.
We learned that games and puzzles are largely seen as non educational, and are especially dismissed in low performing schools. This makes scaling experiences that build on delightful, and positive engagement with students challenging. One of our partners, who produce educational puzzle kits and are in thousands of schools across the country, stated that the biggest struggle they had in getting their product in more schools was the fact that it was classified as a game.
One of the strengths of standardized testing is that it is effective at measuring multiple students simultaneously. It is convenient that these tests focus on academic content, and not skills. We learned that measuring collaboration is an involved and detailed process that is very much dependent on the individual student and their context. This means that measuring collaboration requires a lot more effort and resources to be effective. Further, the quality of the assessment is heavily reliant on the observation and empathy skills of the assessor. It is necessary to train teachers how to effectively measure collaboration to make sure they are using the practice with fidelity.
Collaboration looks different in every context. We learned from Neeraj Sonalkar, a Stanford researcher that there was no single standard for good collaboration. Behaviors and practices that work well in one group, might be disruptive and harmful in another. This reality presents major difficulty in trying to effectively measure good collaboration. We reframed our entire way of thinking based on this finding. Instead of trying to model what “correct” collaboration looks like, we shifted our focus to build internal capacity for students to reflect on whether their behaviors in collaborative settings were contributing positively or negatively to a group’s ability to solve problems. We hypothesize that increased self awareness during collaborative group work will present an opportunity for students to effectively work in any group by modifying their behavior appropriately.
We also learned that the measuring experience in of itself can also help students build further self awareness for collaborative behaviors. Encouraging teachers to allow students to assess their peers frees up educators, and provides a unique opportunity to have students build their own skills as assessors. We revised our tools to be more easily adoptable by students. This included eliminating overly technical language, more user-friendly design, and a focus on one to one observation.
We learned that escape room design provides a great project based learning experience. Many teachers used our how-to kit’s to instruct their students on designing an escape room, as they felt this was a powerful teaching opportunity. Designing an escape room requires high levels of empathy, critical thinking, and collaboration. Designing puzzles is also a good way of teaching how to prototype early, and utilize testing to iterate. This insight led us to encourage teachers to have students split off into groups and develop escape rooms for the other groups. This model was also congruent with having students observe and assess their peers’ collaboration skills.
What Now?
A few months ago I went to visit the puzzle bus, which quietly sits in a parking lot beside the Stanford Farm. It was a dreary sight — The truck is now a shadow of all the excitement and joy it evoked just a couple years prior. Like many things, the pandemic has put the puzzle bus in an indefinite hiatus. The cardboard puzzles have become dusty from disuse, and the brightly colored posters on the wall have faded with time. It was hard to not feel nostalgic, but it is also a reminder of just how much we have been deprived of as we transitioned to remote learning. Although many educators have transitioned to running escape-room-like experiences online, there is something about the joy of physically being in a place. The puzzle bus isn’t just an educational tool — it was also a way of being in the world, a way of connecting with other people, and a dream of what could be. And don’t we desperately need that right now?
I’m not sure what the future holds for the puzzle bus. I don’t know if I’ll make another escape room inside it, or if it will be repurposed as something else. But I do know that it represents the joy of learning and doing with others. That is especially important considering how many students have been plucked from their social communities. We need to be together now more than ever and provide a space to heal, reconnect, and grow. We shouldn’t forget that our ability to be in proximity with one another can slip away at any moment — which is all the more reason to make sure we make the time we are together as meaningful and memorable as possible.
