7 Creative Digital Clue Ideas for Classroom Breakout Boxes with BookWidgets

In this collection of classroom-tested ideas, BookWidgets educator Brenda Gullikson shares how she uses seven different widget-types to create digital clues for physical breakout boxes.

Breakout boxes and classroom escape activities transform review lessons into collaborative problem-solving experiences. Students search for clues, solve puzzles, crack codes, and work together to unlock the next challenge. BookWidgets makes it easy to combine interactive digital activities with physical breakout boxes, giving students new clues, puzzles, and challenges to solve throughout the game.

In this guest post, teacher Brenda Gullikson shares how she uses BookWidgets to simplify breakout activities and eliminate many of the logistical challenges that come with physical breakout boxes. Her classroom-tested ideas demonstrate how different BookWidgets widgets can reveal clues, unlock codes, and guide students from one challenge to the next.

Looking for More Breakout Inspiration?

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👋 New to BookWidgets?

BookWidgets is an all-in-one lesson creation and assessment platform built by teachers, for teachers. With 40+ interactive activity types and 35+ question-types, you can create quizzes, games, worksheets, timelines, hotspot images, and many other interactive lesson activities. Throughout this article, Brenda demonstrates how several of these widgets can be combined to create engaging digital clues for classroom breakout boxes.

Looking for ready-to-use examples? Browse the BookWidgets Blog Group to search hundreds of ready-to-use classroom activities by keyword, subject, or widget type. You can copy any lesson to your own account, customize it for your students, and share it in minutes.

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Brenda's Classroom Story: A Digital Twist on Breakout Boxes

We asked BookWidgets users to share how they use BookWidgets in their classrooms. Here's how Brenda incorporated BookWidgets into her breakout box activities to create engaging, reusable learning experiences for her students.

My students enjoy the problem solving activity of breakout boxes. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, students solve a series of puzzles or tasks that lead them to a prize.

You can use breakout boxes to:

• introduce concepts;
• reinforce information;
• and review.

The Brownie Breakout Box Challenge

My favorite was using the concept to review basic cooking information such as fractions, measuring, safety, terms, etc.

Students had made brownies in a lab and were supposed to enjoy their creations during a review for a test.

Then it hit me. They were going to work to get their brownies. I created a series of puzzles that would eventually give them a key to the box that contained their brownies. The students enjoyed the process, and of course, ... the brownies.

I have to admit that setting up the activities and tasks can be daunting, especially with multiple class periods in a row.

One of the first tasks that I often have students do, is to work as a team to put together a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece has a number on it. I give students coordinates for 3 numbers that correlate to the combination on a lock containing the next activity.

Problem: Over time, pieces get lost, I find them on the floor and I have to put all the puzzles together to figure out which one it belongs to, and pieces get damaged.

The questions that are constantly in the back of my mind are “How can I make this more efficient?” and “How can I be sure that this will work for several classes in a row?”.

Cue BookWidgets!

There are many options in BookWidgets that can be used to create digital clues for the breakout box. The list below are the ideas that I came up with. I am confident that as you work through the process of setting up this learning experience for students, more ideas will occur.

For my setup, I have programmable padlocks. The goal: students have to access a 3 digit code.

7 Creative Ways to Build Digital Breakout Clues with BookWidgets

1. Reveal Secret Codes with Worksheets and Quizzes

Create a series of true/false questions. Make three of the questions false. Students use the question numbers that correlate with the false answers to open the next lock.

Another option would be to use multiple choice questions that have numbers assigned to various choices.

You can use the "feedback function" as well. Here, you can give students a message (clue, code or link to a new widget) when students achieve a certain grade. In order to get the feedback, students will have to get, for example, at least 80% on the worksheet or quiz. If not, they have to keep on trying.

Kate's Classroom Tip: The Worksheet and Quiz widgets make it easy to create automatically graded breakout challenges. Use the feedback feature to reveal a clue, code, or link to the next activity only after students meet your success criteria. Want even more ideas? Explore our Ultimate Guide to Formative Assessment for assessment strategies that work just as well inside breakout activities as they do during everyday lessons.

2. Sequence Events to Reveal a Secret Code

Create a series of events or steps in a process for students to put in order. Assign each event or step a number that will create a code. When students have put the events in the right order, the numbers will line op well and create the right code.

Kate's Classroom Tip: The Timeline widget isn't just for history. Use it to sequence scientific processes, writing steps, math procedures, engineering design cycles, or life cycles. Looking for more inspiration? Check out 40+ Fun Ways to Use an Interactive Timeline in Your Lessons.

3. Turn Your Classroom into a Scavenger Hunt

Use pictures of the classroom to act as clues for where students can go to find their next clue or the final reward. For example: the classroom sink. There, you could paste a paper with a verse on and a book title. Students have to look for the verse in the classroom library and remember the right page. This can be useful to find the end code.

Kate's Classroom Tip: The Image Carousel widget works well for scavenger hunts because students can connect digital clues to physical locations or map each image to a location using Google Maps. It also works well for museum walks, virtual field trips, and digital gallery walks throughout the school year. For additional inspiration, read 30 Creative Ways to Teach with Interactive Image-Based Lessons.

4. Hide Interactive Clues Inside an Image

Create hidden hotspots on an image related to your content. These hotspots can be text, audio, images, video and links to other widgets. Students have to pan the image to find information that will help them solve the puzzle or go to the next clue.

You can also insert a map of the school or your classroom as background image and insert hidden hotspots with clues to new clues, hidden in the classroom or school.

Kate's Classroom Tip: Each hotspot in the Hotspot Image widget can reveal text, images, audio, video, websites, or even another BookWidgets activity, allowing you to layer clues and connect multiple challenges without leaving the same image, which makes it easy to build multi-step breakout challenges where one clue unlocks the next. Looking for more ideas? Explore 20 Inspiring Hotspot Image Activities to Integrate in Your Class.

5. Reveal Clues with Video, Audio, and Images

Create audio and video files (upload to YouTube) to include with images that will give students instructions or give them clues. You know how it goes by now, so use your imagination!

Include, for example, a video of a teacher colleague held hostage with a newspaper in front of her. Students should be able to get clues out of the video that leads them to next clue. How cool would it be if, when students reach the place where your colleague is held hostage, they would really find her and could free her. That's a true endgame!

Kate's Classroom Tip: The TipTiles widget lets you reveal text, images, audio, video, and web content one tile at a time. Use it to deliver clues, differentiate hints, or build a multimedia storyline that guides students through your breakout challenge. Looking for more classroom ideas? Explore 5 Visual Learning Lesson Ideas with TipTiles.

6. Connect Multiple Games with Reward Words

Many game widgets like Pair Matching, Jigsaw Puzzle, Memory game and Spot the difference have the option to put in a reward word. Create the information that you want students to access. Change the reward word to the code for the next task or to the final 3 digit code.

Kate's Classroom Tip: All Game widgets, including Pair Matching, Jigsaw Puzzle, Memory Game, and Spot the Difference, can reveal a reward word when students finish the activity. Instead of making the reward word the final answer, use it as the clue to the next challenge, a password to unlock another BookWidgets activity, or one piece of a larger mystery that students solve by completing several games. Game-based learning activities also make engaging lesson starters, station rotations, review games, and homework assignments. Find even more ideas in How to Create Digital Game Activities for the Remote Classroom.

7. Solve Math Challenges to Unlock the Next Clue

Here, you can give students a reward word when they have calculated everything right. Students get a letter or a digit everytime they are right untill they find the complete reward word. This word can be a clue to the next task. You could also enter digits as reward word letters. In the end, students have to cumulate all the digits with each other to get their first digits of the code.

Kate's Classroom Tip: The Arithmetic widget automatically reveals one letter of a reward phrase with each correct answer, making it a natural fit for breakout activities. Use the completed reward phrase as the clue to the next task, a hidden location, or the final code students need to unlock the box. For more classroom math ideas, explore The Ultimate Classroom Collection of 30+ Free Interactive Math Activities.

Sharing Breakout Activities Through Your LMS

Any of these activities can be assigned through Google Classroom as well. I would schedule the clues to appear at various times throughout the class period or create drafts that are sent to groups of students. Those drafts can be sent out as groups accomplish the tasks.

These are just the tip of the iceberg of how BookWidgets can be used to create or augment the breakout box experience. Let your creativity lose and create a fun breakout experience for your students. They will love it!

Kate's Classroom Tip: Today, breakout activities aren't limited to Google Classroom. BookWidgets also integrates with Microsoft Teams, Canvas, Moodle, Brightspace D2L, itslearning, and other learning management systems, making it easy to distribute clues, collect student work, and provide feedback within the platform your school already uses. If you're new to BookWidgets or want to learn more about LMS integrations, start with BookWidgets for Teachers Who Want to Give Better Feedback and Assessments.

Wrap Up

Brenda's classroom story shows how a few thoughtfully designed digital clues can make breakout boxes easier to manage, easier to reuse, and just as engaging for every class period.

A big thank you to Brenda Gullikson for sharing her classroom ideas and inspiring other educators to think creatively about using BookWidgets in breakout activities.

Do you have a BookWidgets classroom story to share? We'd love to hear how you're using BookWidgets with your students. Whether you've created an innovative lesson, discovered a unique teaching strategy, or found a creative way to engage learners, your experience could inspire teachers around the world. Email us at info@bookwidgets.com to be featured in a future BookWidgets blog post.

Explore More with BookWidgets

Want to discover even more ways to create engaging, interactive learning experiences with BookWidgets?

✔️ If you're new to BookWidgets, start with Getting Started with BookWidgets to learn how to create interactive lessons, provide meaningful feedback, and save time with digital assessment.

✔️ Looking for more breakout ideas? Explore How to Create an Escape the Classroom Game (Free Lesson Examples) and Using Secret Messages in the Classroom: The Best Tools and Lesson Ideas.

✔️ Sign up for upcoming free webinars or watch past sessions on the BookWidgets Teacher Academy.

✔️ Learn more about special pricing for schools and teacher groups and bring BookWidgets to your entire school or district.

✔️ Follow BookWidgets on BlueSky and LinkedIn, and join our BookWidgets Teachers Facebook Community to connect with educators, exchange ideas, and discover classroom inspiration.