Mitosis Escape Room

I have several escape rooms and they are always a hit with students. Today I want to walk you through the different ways you can set up the Mitosis Escape Room from my membership. I like to approach all of content with an eye towards engagement because it helps with classroom management AND learning. Win-Win. Check out the other fun ways to teach mitosis.

My escape rooms include 4 tasks to complete. Each of the first 3 tasks give students a code word to help decode the encrypted message in task 4.

For the mitosis escape room, tasks 1-3 are a sorting task, identification task, and a text with questions. I also include station cards, scene card, and answer sheet, oops cards, and completion cards.

The options are truly endless.

When you open the file the instructions are going to talk about 3 different ways to approach this escape room.

This choice is low teacher interaction and low teacher prep. Put students in their working groups. For the mitosis escape room, I would have a copy of each task ready for the group. I do the same thing for students that were absent, but need to complete the review. They will also need the answer sheet. They get everything at the same time (I suggest holding the encrypted message until you get correct answers for tasks 1-3) and a group wins by finishing first.

Students work at their desk and there is limited movement.

It looks something like this:

This choice is medium teacher interaction and low teacher prep. In this option, each group has an answer sheet and one task. The next task is only handed to the group once the previous task has been completed successfully.

This makes sure that students are on the right track. You will need to be available to check and hand out the next task. This has a good balance between engagement and fun.

Looks something like this:

This choice is high teacher interaction and high teacher prep. Students are moving around the room searching for the tasks to complete. The students need to complete tasks 1-3 to be able to complete the encrypted message.

The tasks are set up like stations throughout the room and students can play through them simultaneously. Without good classroom procedures this can quickly erupt into chaos.

Each of these tasks would be in a different area of the room. I have multiples of each station to complete the tasks in a timely manner.

Students are asked to sort clue cards into columns labeled as mitosis or interphase of the cell cycle.

Each of the cards is placed in the correct column in numerical order. Like this:

This reveals a letter which will be part of the code word.

There are two options for this one. The teacher can choose to have students identify images or descriptions of the different phases of the cell cycle.

Students read a text and answer questions.

These code words decode the encrypted message, which is task 4.