This group retrieval practice activity replaces the Type Tournament in the fully remote version of my course. I had initially lost the party game aspect of the Type Tournament when converting to a fully remote format. I used Factile and Kahoot to try and simulate a similar fun, competitive atmosphere, but soon ran into an issue with one-on-one competitions. Even in a low-stakes environment, my students weren’t responding very well to losing to their classmates. Especially when there’s a clear winner early on in the game. So I looked for small group games that could be played remotely and stumbled on the digital escape room. The following is my attempt using Google Forms as the vehicle.
The Story
A strange curse has befallen the kingdom of Typograhpia, deleting everyone’s fonts and causing all written text to be shown in a strange cryptic font known as Papyrus. Our only hope in reversing this affliction is reinstalling the original fonts from the Sacred Font Folder hidden deep in the dungeons of Typographia. But reaching it won’t be easy, as the locks of the dungeon door are secured by mind-bending puzzles based on ancient Typographic wisdom.
The Logistics
I split the class into groups of four. I’ve found this number to be small enough to encourage collaboration and deter freeloading.
After giving them the story, I instruct the students to work through each puzzle together, as a group. They can feel free to share one person’s screen, as they’re working on each same puzzle or have it up on their individual screens, but it’s important to make it clear they’re expected to work together to solve the puzzles.
Then I share the link to the Escape Room in the chat and open the breakout rooms.
Once they’ve completed the final puzzle they’ll see instructions to leave the breakout room and do one final task once they return to the main Zoom room. Since I typically do this activity near the end of the semester, for their final task I ask students to share the one thing they’ll remember the most from the class. This serves as a final retrieval activity as well as a great opportunity to talk casually and freely with the students.
The Puzzles
Puzzle 1: Why is Typography Important?
This lock requires a 4 letter code. Each answer option ties to a discussion point brought up during the “Why Should I Care?” lecture so it should be an easy one, but since this is asking them to remember something from the very beginning of the semester it trips them up more than they expect.
Puzzle 2: Font Psychology
This starts off as a jigsaw puzzle (hosted on puzzel.org) that reveals an image of a piece of text written in Sans Forgetica. Once they finish putting the puzzle together, however, students still need to descramble the 6-letter word from the red letters to figure out this clue.
Puzzle 3: Font Classification
This is a 4 digit lock where students need to remember how typefaces are classified. The trick here is students need to notice that each classification’s folder has a year associated with it, and that indicates the order their numbers are in the code.
Puzzle 4: Type Anatomy
This lock requires 5 letter/digit combinations, comprised of a digit that points to a body part, and the letter that has that ‘body part’ highlighted.
Puzzle 5: Font personalities
This lock requires a 4 symbol code. The goal here is to see how students register the personality of certain typefaces, using movie genres as a substitute for various personalities.
Puzzle 6: Parts of a grid
The final lock requires 4 letters. This time the students need to recall the parts of a grid, then figure out what order the highlighted letters should be entered into the code. The colors associated with each of the clues is the hint.
Teaching Type to Hostages 