Escape rooms are a fun way to bond with others and put your critical thinking skills to the test! An escape room is a game where people are ‘locked in’ a room and must find a way out by finding clues and solving puzzles (Cambridge Dictionary, 2025). Escape rooms are popular because they are wonderful social bonding experiences where teams of people must work together to get out of the room.
In the past few years, several schools and universities started using educational escape rooms as an alternative method to teach students different subjects, ranging from math, history, science, and other subjects! One study had 62 students in Spain learn mathematical topics through an escape room model and found that it reduced learning anxiety while increasing motivation and learning achievement (Fuentes-Cabrera et al., 2020). Another study had 528 elementary school students go through either a virtual escape room or other digital game-based learning activities and found that the students preferred the digital escape room because it lead to higher collaboration and stronger motivation to learn among the students (Vidergor, 2021).
During my time at Georgia Tech, I’ve created two separate science-themed escape rooms from scratch with my friends and ran them both four times collectively. We had a lot of fun, and I learned so much about escape rooms – both making and playing them – in the process. I think escape rooms are a wonderful way for people to learn and apply their knowledge while being in a fun environment and bonding with people around them who share the same interests. There are many escape room templates online that you can use, but I want to make this guide if you want to make your own customizable escape room that tailors to your audience. In this guide, I’ll share some tips about making an escape room from scratch as well as some of my own experiences.
Step 1: Choose a Theme and a Storyline
Choose a theme based upon your intended audience. For example, my intended audience was college students who were in different science majors, so I incorporated elements (pun intended) from as many science fields as I could. If you are making an escape room for your biology class, make the room biology themed.
Once you have a theme, create a storyline about why they are in the room. Maybe an evil scientist is creating a formula to destroy the world, and they must figure out the formula to stop them! Maybe the room is part of a colony on Mars that lost power and communication with Earth and the crew (participants) need to work together to restore the colony’s original functions so they can get back, but they must do it quickly because oxygen levels are depleting fast! The more interesting the storyline, the more interested your players will be. The sky’s the limit with your storyline but ensure that it matches with the theme of the room and add in a specific reason for the time limit (e.g. oxygen levels depleting within the hour on the Mars colony). Both escape rooms I held involved an evil magician who performed strange alchemy experiments, and the participants were playing as detectives who got trapped inside the evil magician’s hideout. Be as creative as you want with your storyline!
Step 2: Determine a Game Flow Plan
Choose how you want your puzzles to be organized. Do you want your puzzles to be connected to each other linearly or do you want multiple puzzles that can be solved separately from each other?
I organized my puzzles into 5 puzzle sets with a final number at the end of each set. Each set had 3 to 4 puzzles that had to be solved in order but sets themselves could be solved independently of each other. For example, puzzle A1 had to be solved to unlock puzzle A2, but puzzle B1 could be solved without needing to solve A1. For the participants to escape, there was a final door code (found by writing all the numbers at the end of each set in a specified order on a whiteboard).
It’s up to you on how you want your puzzles to be organized, but it’s beneficial to have each puzzle lead to something else (unless it’s a red herring puzzle in which it will lead nowhere).
Step 3: Design Puzzles
Once you have your puzzle outline down, it’s time to make the puzzles! There are a variety of puzzle types you can choose from. This list below is not extensive, but these are some of the puzzle types I used:
- Hiding secret messages in documents (letters, posters, newspaper clippings, etc.) by using CAPTIALS, bolding, italicizing, and underlining specific letters or words
- If you want to make it more complex, you can use bolding and italicizing to create two different messages – one is a real message that leads to the next puzzle while the other message is a funny red herring but doesn’t lead to anything.
- Locking items in boxes, cabinets, etc.
- You can buy lock boxes from a store or you can punch holes into cardboard boxes and attach combination locks to them.
- There are a variety of locks you can use: number locks, letter locks, among others.
- Ciphers
- Caesar cipher (each letter is shifted by a fixed amount)
- Morse code (using dots and dashes for letters and numbers) – requires a key
- Atbash cipher (alphabet is reversed; A becomes Z, B becomes Y, etc.)
- Braille (using raised dots or gem stickers to form numbers or words) – requires a key
- Pig Pen cipher (alphabet letters are replaced with parts of a grid or by a set of symbols) – requires a key
- Putting a sequence of events in order which reveals a code
- Counting the number of colored objects drawn on a board to reveal a code
There are many other puzzle methods you can use, but keep your intended audience in mind as you determine which puzzles to use. Try to avoid making your puzzles too complex or else your audience may not understand how to solve them which can lead to immense frustration.
Step 4: Determine How to Integrate Puzzles into Room
Once you make the puzzles, determine where you want to hide them! They can be hidden in locked places (boxes, cabinets, etc.) or they can be hidden in plain sight (e.g. a letter with a hidden message sitting on a table in the open). I recommend writing down the locations of each puzzle in your answer key, so setting up the room will be much easier (and you can find puzzles that you’ve hidden away in case you forget).
If your puzzles are interconnected with one another, determine how you’ll ensure they must solve the previous puzzle before continuing to the next one. I usually locked up the next puzzle in the sequence and participants would have to solve the previous puzzle to get the code for the lock.
Additionally, use props to bring the room to life! Use props related to the theme and storyline you’re doing for your escape room, and they don’t have to be expensive props. You can either use things you already have, make props, or buy props to bring the escape room to life. The more props you use, the more immersive the experience will be!
Step 5: Test and Adjust Puzzles (If Possible)
It is beneficial to test your puzzles and/or your entire room with people who are not doing the escape room (if you can) prior to your official date. A puzzle that is easy for you to understand may be difficult for someone else to understand, so testing out your puzzles ensures that the puzzles are not too complicated for your intended audience.
Step 6: Run the Escape Room!
You’ve done all the hard work in making the escape room, so now it’s time for the big day!
Some tips from my experience:
- Make sure to either have an answer key or have the answers memorized in case the participants need help
- Start setting up early! Make sure to have at least an hour or two hours for set up based upon how complex the room will be (more puzzles and decorations/props = more set up time)
- Remove as many items as you can that are not related to the escape room to avoid confusion
- Make sure to state the rules prior to participants starting the escape room (These are the ones I used but you can add more)
- There is only key or code per lock
- Don’t break the ceiling, walls, or any delicate furniture/technology
- Don’t stand on the furniture
- Don’t need to dig through the trash cans
- You write using paper/pencils or whiteboards
- They have X amount of time to escape (usually 45-60 minutes but ours lasted 2 hours because we had a complex set up)
Making an escape room can be daunting, but it’s an amazing adventure at the end of the day! It’s a rewarding experience for players and can be a fun educational experience where participants can learn while bonding with their peers.
Thanks for reading!
Bibliography
Cambridge Dictionary. (2025, January 29). escape room. @CambridgeWords. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/escape-room
Fuentes-Cabrera, A., Parra-González, M. E., López-Belmonte, J., & Segura-Robles, A. (2020). Learning Mathematics with Emerging Methodologies—The Escape Room as a Case Study. Mathematics, 8(9), 1586. https://doi.org/10.3390/math8091586
How to Make an Escape Room at Home: DIY Guide. (2024). Escapely. https://escapely.com/how-to-make-an-escape-room/
Vidergor, H. E. (2021). Effects of digital escape room on gameful experience, collaboration, and motivation of elementary school students. Computers & Education, 104156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2021.104156
