West African Trade Kingdoms Digital Escape Room

I designed this digital breakout for my 7th graders to review our West African Trade Kingdoms (Ghana, Mali, and Songhai) Unit. Most of my students have a blast when we do escape rooms, even when a clue baffles them.

This breakout features 16 locks. The kids will need to work together to

solve clues involving:

• cheesy rebuses
• a virtual jigsaw puzzle
• custom Wordles as well as custom Worldles (these are two different things)
• map skill mastery
• solve acrostics by reviewing key concepts and figures from the unit

The students should complete this escape room near the end of a West African history unit. None of the questions asks them to recall obscure facts. Instead, students are tested on their knowledge of big concepts of key figures in West African history (like griots, the trans-Saharan trade, Mansa Musa, etc.).

This product contains a link to a game I created using Breakout Edu. All the clues are already loaded, and the game is entirely ready to go. You and your students don't need a Breakout Edu account to play.

I also included a link to my Google Drive folder that contains every clue. This way, you can copy it and edit things to make them your own if you so desire. If you do make changes, you'll need to recreate the breakout in either Breakout Edu, Google Forms, or another format so that you can incorporate the changes that you've made.

I included an answer key as well.

These take considerable time to put together, but the kids have a blast with them, making it worthwhile.

All slides are viewable by any on the web, but please make sure that your district allows students to view slides outside of their organization before purchase. And if your district blocks jigsaw planet, this activity is still well worth it. Just give them the answer included in the key for that slide.