Visibility of eTwinning Projects Groups July 2019 Newsletter Newsletter 9 | Page 24

Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2019 Newsletter
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Sustainable Development Goals of the United
Nations
Let’s start from the beginning. One day in early
June 2019 I received an e-mail from our National
Support Service (NSS) eTwinning Germany asking if
we teachers were interested in playing a very
“innovative World Escape Room Breakout” with our
classes. The e-mail that our NSS received from the
Spanish founder of “Making Friends around the
World” said: “Would you like to participate in the
digital Escape Room of the eTwinning project
#ERMakingfriends… with challenges, secret
numbers to discover, enigmas to be deciphered,
with Flipgrid and discovering the SDG Global
Goals…?”
And so I thought: “Yes, I’ll certainly propose that to
my students!” It was one of our last weeks of
school. Everybody was thinking about the summer
break and the temperatures in our classrooms
(climate change? SDG? We’ve never seen such a
hot June in Germany before!) rose in a vertiginous
way up to 30°C. Would my students be able to
work on the challenges under these circumstances?
The answer is: yes, they were.
After the introduction there are 12 different
challenges to face.
Example of Challenge 1: “In the video of the
sustainable development goals Malala says a
number. If you can find it, put it on the padlock and
follow the next challenge.”
How a digital Breakout/Escape room activity
works
Each Breakout/Escape room activity starts with a
reason why the students have to solve all the
different challenges prepared for them. In our case,
the introductive story was: “Students from different
schools around the world have been lost in the
world and they are discovering cultures, countries
and different languages... all this has been reflected
in a global comic that tells us these stories. But
they have learned something disturbing about their
travels. The world is haunted by dangers. For that
reason, they want to give a message of peace...
but... you will have to help them to decipher the
enigmas that have been found throughout this
journey around the world... would you like to come
with us?”
My students set up several teams and named them
after animals. We had “tigers”, “elephants”, “cats”
and “dogs”. They worked hard and wanted to reach
the final challenge to open all the locks. In the end,
almost all teams of my class reached the final
challenge and had collected the secret number
needed for the last quiz.
To finish the Breakout activity, there was a final
quiz prepared by students of the eTwinning project
with Quizizz.com. The quiz was completed by my
students the day after they had completed the
digital breakout. By doing so, they summarized
everything they had learned about the Sustainable
Development Goals the day before in a very funny
way.
After a few days, the winning teams received a
certificate of participation they proudly took home.
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