Today we are going to design an escape room activity with the help of Chat GPT to find inspiration, ideas and a few text-based tasks, which will save us time in the process. We will still need to create cards –whether with or without technology-decorate the classroom, hide clues, and so on. However, Gen. AI can, once again, provide a good starting point and save us precious time by offering a theme and a handful of ready-made tasks.
My initial prompt could be: Provide 3 ideas for an escape room for the language classroom. Instead, I am going to refine this prompt and type: “Provide 3 ideas for a Halloween-themed escape room for the language classroom. Be creative and come up with something original that hasn’t been tried yet. Look at it from a fresh perspective or try a different approach.”
I think idea number 2 might be fun (the other ideas were “The Haunted Radio Station” and “The Phantom’s Costume Party”).
2. Witch’s Potion Puzzle
Concept: Students have stumbled into a secret Halloween potion laboratory, where a witch has brewed a potion that can turn them into monsters if they don’t escape in time. To create an antidote, students must gather ingredients by completing Halloween-themed language challenges hidden around the lab.
Tasks:
- Ingredient Hunt: Clues for potion ingredients are written in cryptic language or Halloween-themed rhymes that students must decipher.
- Potion Recipe: Students must follow a Halloween-themed recipe (written in imperative forms or passive voice) to mix the antidote ingredients correctly.
- Spooky Synonyms and Antonyms: Some potion ingredients are named using synonyms or antonyms of common Halloween vocabulary (e.g., instead of “bat wings,” it’s “flying mammal appendages”). Students must identify the correct items by solving these word puzzles.
Skills Focus: Vocabulary building (synonyms, antonyms, and word families), following instructions, and decoding language.
Innovation: The potion-making theme creates a hands-on, interactive experience, combining language skills with tactile and imaginative activities.
Task 1: Ingredient Hunt
Objective: Students must find five potion ingredients hidden in the room by deciphering simple Halloween-themed riddles. Each riddle describes a common spooky object, and the students must match the description to the correct item in the room.
Instructions for Students:
- Around the room, you will find five spooky ingredients that the witch needs for her potion.
- Read the riddle on each card and figure out which ingredient it is talking about.
- Once you know the answer, find the matching ingredient in the room and bring it back to the cauldron!
Riddles and Answers:
- Riddle:
I fly at night, but I am not a plane.
I sleep upside down, in a dark cave.
Answer: Bat (You can place a small toy bat or a picture of one somewhere in the room.)- Riddle:
I’m round and orange, with a scary face.
Light me up, in the fireplace.
Answer: Pumpkin (Place a small pumpkin or a paper cut-out as the hidden object.)- Riddle:
I have eight legs, and I like to spin.
Catching flies is where I begin.
Answer: Spider (Hide a fake spider or a spider decoration in the room.)- Riddle:
I’m white and float, I’m not alive.
People say I make spooky sounds at night.
Answer: Ghost (A paper ghost or toy ghost can be hidden for this one.)- Riddle:
I’m black and magical, I sit on a broom.
I fly with witches over the moon.
Answer: Cat (Use a small toy or picture of a black cat.)
Teacher Instructions:
- Hide the corresponding objects (toy bats, pumpkins, spiders, ghosts, cats) around the room in easy-to-find places.
- After solving each riddle, students must bring the correct object back to the cauldron.
- You can divide the class into teams or pairs to work together, helping each other read and solve the riddles.
- Once all the ingredients are collected, they “complete” the potion and move on to the next task!
I then asked ChatGPT to rewrite more challenging versions of the last two riddles. However, I don’t think the new riddles are any harder to solve. Here was my request: “I would like riddles four and five to be a bit more challenging. You can keep the same answers (ghost and cat) or create different riddles for different answers. It should be more difficult to come up with the right answer.”
Here are revised, more challenging versions of riddles four and five:
4. Riddle (Ghost – More Challenging):
I have no feet, but I float in the air.
When people see me, they get quite a scare.
I can pass through walls without a sound,
In haunted houses, I’m often found.
Answer: Ghost
5. Riddle (Cat – More Challenging):
With fur as dark as the night sky,
I watch with glowing yellow eyes.
Superstitions say I bring bad luck,
But I prefer to purr, and not to bite or scratch.
Answer: Cat
One could, perhaps, scramble the letters of some of the nouns or verbs in the riddles and ask the students to rearrange the letters of the words in bold, like this:
I fly at ignht, but I am not a lapne.
I sleep upside down, in a dark vace.
We would still likely want to decorate the classroom and play some spooky background music, in addition to creating the actual escape room materials. The riddles can be copied and pasted into a word processing document, and then copies can be printed. We can also draw the answers to the riddles or simply print out images from the Internet. So there’s still plenty of work to be done.
Needless to say, I’ve only experimented with the first task so far, but there are a few others to explore. I will spare you the –interesting- instructions for the potion recipe and encourage you to give it a try and design your own ChatGPT assisted escape room.
AI in ELT 