Experience First

In today’s Unit 3 review, students will work in groups to solve a set of 6 clues that will ultimately unlock the doors of their escape room. There are many ways to set up this activity. You can use a series of combination locks or simply have students write their code on a sticky note that they show you and you validate. In our class we did this activity with Google Forms. See this post about turning any worksheet into an Escape Room using Google Forms.

We gave students 45 minutes to make it through all the clues. Be creative about coming up with an escape room scenario that works with the context of your students. We kept things simple and told our students they were trapped inside the school and had 45 minutes until the electricity was shut off and all the key fobs would stop working entirely!

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Formalize Later

Although no new content is introduced in these clues, students do have to apply their knowledge in new ways. For example, in clue 2, they are given the structure of the expanded logarithmic expression and must work to find the proper coefficients.

The second multiple choice question in clue 4 also stumped many of our students. The idea of seeing parameters in problems instead of specific values is notoriously difficult for students but great practice for learning to recognize structure.