How to survive a great space adventure – our virtual Escape Room game

When attending school was impossible and our everyday routine constisted of video conferences and exercises on Mebis due to Corona, our teacher Ms Helms tried to bring variety into our English lessons and motivate us by offering the online game „The Great Space Adventure“, a virtual Escape Room game. During those games you need to solve riddles and complete puzzles in a fixed amount of time with the goal of „escaping the room“.

Our mission in the (voluntary) game conference was to make our spaceship, the SS Old Reliable, work again and be able to travel back to Earth. Among crewmates there were also classmates who had special roles and tasks, such as captain, engineer, doctor or handy person. They had clues to help in emergency cases. However, we all had to collaborate to master our challenges and make the ship run again. What I loved most were the moments when we had to sing together to save the ship from dropping or rising temperature. Even though I didn’t know some of the songs, it was really great fun to sing or hum along with the rest of the class! Pantomiming into the camera also got us some great laughs. In some situations, maybe, some more options to choose from would have been nice - technical obstacles with BigBlueButton though hampered more variety the game edition had actually offered.

Languagewise we all got along well; instructions and puzzles weren’t difficult to understand and playing the virtual game certainly helped our confidence and fluency in the English language. I would definitely play such a game again – it was a fabulous and new experience to take part in such an Escape Room with my classmates together. Overall, „The Great Space Adventure“ was a great experience, which made home-schooling a lot more enjoyable!

Sanja Kundmüller, 9d; J. Helms