My students are a group of 7th and 8th graders who learn in a multi-age setting and learn primarily through PBL. In addition to covering state-mandated standards, we also focus on teaching 21st century skills, such as collaboration, communication, personal accountability, and critical thinking.
These kids crave the challenge of solving problems without a clear or singular answer, which makes PBL an ideal way for them to learn.
Throughout their time at ZQuest they have engaged with a vast array of real-world problems and used their academic learning to solve them.
Like all PBL projects, the students will exercise their collaboration and critical thinking skills. The students are required to incorporate facts from different categories, such as social hierarchy and government, from their assigned empire, along with literary devices, to create a cohesive escape room game. In addition to combining skills in both ELA and social studies, the students must also collaborate with another empires so that their two games share a cross-over element--just as the empires interacted in real life.
In Their Own Words
We want to teach people about different empires and about how they succeeded and fell. We are doing this through a PBL where we are designing an escape room. The people who will play our games will have to use their logic and teamwork to solve different puzzles related to different empires.
Since this is a big project, we have to keep our group members and ourselves on track. When people come to play our escape rooms, we also need to lead them through it. We have to teach them about the rules and tell them the story behind our room. They will need to be introduced to the empire so that they know what they will be doing, including giving instructions. We also need to help the players by giving hints that don't reveal the whole puzzle.
This project is important because we are learning about different empires but in a fun way. We are also learning about collaboration, problem-solving, and communicating. We will host a night for families and community members to come in and play our games. The funds from this night will be used for our Washington DC trip.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Blowers and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.