Ready to create your own Escape Room?
by Citizens In Power
As ER-SE team has been approaching the finalization of the third intellectual output, the comprehensive Module Pack, we have been working hard on the creation of all the graphical, analogue, digital and intellectual resources that will be used in order to implement the 12 ER scenarios.
In order to do that our team had to turn the Internet upside down to find free online resources (such as images, vectors and video materials) that we can use to create our own graphism. During the creation we have came across a several websites with free creative commons licence content. Here is the list of those we found most useful:
IMAGES
Websites that provide the user with free images, such as photographs, illustrations & sketches with transparent background. A lot of the elements from these websites were used in our own graphical resources. We have used these images and image elements to create the final resources, such as company logos and wall paintings that include hidden clues. The images and graphics used for our IO3 have creative commons licence and are therefore free of charge for the user.
- https://pixabay.com/ – Free images
- https://www.freepngs.com/ – Free images
- https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ – People’s portraits that belong to people who do not exist
SOURCE: ERSE graphical materials
FREE ONLINE SOFTWARE
For some of our rooms we had to create whole newspaper articles, ransom notes, company documents, medical prescriptions. Digging through internet came in handy here, as we discovered very cool free online software that creates specifically those elements.
https://breakyourownnews.com/ – you can easily create a breaking news article that looks as if it was appearing on the national TV news.
http://www.ransomizer.com/ – helps you create ransom notes in different fonts and colors.
SOURCE: ERSE graphical materials
VIDEOS
We have also had to find some free video clips and sounds in order to make our own introductory videos for some of our scenarios. The best sites we encountered during this phase were:
The text to speech technology was also something we have used for the spoken part of the videos. There are multiple options in terms of language, accent and gender, that one can use free of charge on https://ttsmp3.com/
And as for video editing, we have used Open Shot Video software that is free of charge for the user.
QR CODES
All of our rooms have clues hidden in QR codes, that the learners will have to scan in order to gain hints and clues. While tere are many QR code generators online, most of them require a small fee in order to keep the codes funcional for longer times. However, with http://goqr.me/ you can easily create codes from Web URLs, E-mails, locations or simple texts.
AND MORE
There are also multiple choices when it comes to background sounds that one might used during the implementation of the educational escape rooms. The most useful site that helped us here was: http://www.orangefreesounds.com/
Feeling motivated to start working on your own ER? Check out our IO1 guidebook that will help you plan it up to detail: https://er-se.eu/en/resources/.