School Break Erasmus Project

Project Title

School Break

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Pedagogy and didactics; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

SchoolBreak’s main objective was to exploit the educational advantages of escape rooms. Escape rooms are a relatively new entertainment form in which small groups of players work together over a set time to solve puzzles – and escape a real life locked room. Educational advantages relate to their motivational impact (e.g. challenge, group work, competition, story immersion) and their educational methodology, partly based on cross-curricular skills (e.g. experiantial, problem-solving, cognitive activation). On this basis educational escape rooms (eER) can also be designed to meet specific curriculum goals.
From this two partial objectives of SchoolBreak are derived:
– providing easy to play educational escape rooms for different topics (taking into account the topical specializations of the partner organisations)
– providing a framework for the usage and design of eERs by teachers and students – mainly for secunday education.

On the project website – combined with additional information and resources – SchoolBreak offers a set of 25 eERs, plus 17 translations into other partner languages, plus 1 in an additional online-version.

Also on the website SchoolBreak presents five manuals in five languages (English, German, Spanish, Italian, French):
#1 Using escape rooms in teaching
#2 Designing educational escape rooms (i.e. by teachers)
#3 Learning through escape room design (i.e. by school students)
#4 Puzzles and other things to unlock
#5 Plot-Puzzle for Educational Escape Rooms Design

Additionally introductory videos in German and Italian.

SchoolBreak was heavily affected adversely by the covid-crisis. The original plan to work with school students became very difficult for most partners. If there was face-to-face teaching at all, externals were often not allowed to enter schools and most of all teachers set other priorities than testing new training methods. Therefore SchoolBreak targeted more teachers and teacher trainees and disseminated more via digial media. The extension of the project until Aug. 2021 did not change the situation significantly. Overall the outreach into schools was not as systematical as intended.

In a number of international, national and regional workshops and courses more than 54.000 teachers and teacher trainees could be reached.
The exploitation of results by the partners is going on this way also after the project lifetime.

Project Website

http://www.school-break.eu/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 190835 Eur

Project Coordinator

Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg & Country: DE

Project Partners

• FUNDACIO PER A LA UNIVERSITAT OBERTA DE CATALUNYA
• Archivio della Memoria
• LIMERICK INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
• UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM