How US schools use locked wooden box puzzle to motivate students

One of the most talked-about education tech innovations in the US this summer is not so hi-tech. Actually, it is mostly wood-based.

Occupying a school bus parked outside the annual conference of the International Society for Technology in Education recently, a tiny start-up called Breakout EDU generated waiting lines as teachers queued up to get a peek.

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The company is based in California, though its chief executive, Adam Bellow, lives in New York. At its simplest, Breakout EDU takes the appeal of the “escape room”, a recreational team sport in which a group of people use their wits to break out of a locked room, and turns it inside out.

Instead of a locked room, teams must figure out how to get inside a tightly locked box. Breakout EDU builds the wooden boxes by hand and sells them online, along with an assortment of hasps, locks, invisible ink pens and guidelines. Teachers build lessons around students’ nearly insatiable need to get into that box.

The wooden models go for US$119 (about HK$920) plus shipping, but demand has been so high that the company recently contracted for a compact, black plastic model resembling a tiny suitcase.

“We’re all educators on the team, so the educators in all of us say, ‘We’re never going to be billionaires from this.’”

The company wants to impact teaching at a basic level, making it more problem-based, more social, more interactive and more physical. “I have little kids,” Bellow says. “When I see them doing this in their class, that is what I want for their education.”

A former Presidential Innovation fellow at the White House (as is co-founder James Sanders), Bellow saw the Breakout EDU model at a professional development event for teachers in Baltimore in March 2015. “I said, ‘This is it. This is lightning in a bottle.’”