For Teachers & Educators

Your students don’t play games.
They build them.

EscapeMaker is the ad-free creative tool that turns any classroom into an escape room studio. Free to try. $500 a year for a complete classroom of 25 students, with no student email addresses collected.

Create My Teacher Account →

Build a game today without paying anything. You need a classroom only when your students want logins of their own, and it covers you as well as all 25 of them.

Free to start · No ads, ever · No student personal info required
Why teachers pick EscapeMaker

Built for classrooms.
Designed for builders.

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Students design escape rooms about your curriculum.

Math facts. Vocabulary. The Civil War. The periodic table. Whatever you’re teaching, your students design a 5-room escape about it: writing the narrative, sequencing the puzzles, illustrating the scenes. They build. You teach. The escape room is the assignment.

Project-based learning Computational thinking Narrative writing Visual design
✓

No ads, ever.

Not on classroom games. Not on the library. Not anywhere. Nothing to filter, nothing to approve.

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Export to any LMS.

One click → one .html file. Drops into Canvas, Schoology, Google Sites, your school intranet. No installs.

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No student personal info required.

Students get a class login with a nickname their teacher picks. They play and build games. We never ask for a real name, email, birthday, or contact info. Nothing that identifies a child.

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Family-friendly library.

E-rated games pinned for classroom use. Curated, safe for K-12.

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Lesson plan templates.

Math, ELA, science, history. Drop-in templates for grades 3-12. Coming soon.

Beyond escape rooms

One studio. The right game for every subject.

Escape rooms are where most classes start — but the same safe, ad-free studio (with no student personal info) builds other point-and-click game types too. Students pick the format that fits what you’re teaching, then export it as one file they own.

❓ Quiz & Trivia Games

Review games for any unit — that students build and own as a file, not lock inside someone else’s app.

🔗 Choose Your Own Adventure

“What would you do?” decisions for history, ethics, and health — choices branch to different scenes and endings.

🎭 Visual Novels

Language practice and SEL scenarios told through characters, portraits, and branching dialogue.

🔍 Hidden Object Games

Vocabulary hunts and “find the parts” diagram games — spot the items hidden across a scene.

🧩 Puzzle & Logic Games

Math and pattern challenges built from ten puzzle types — no story required.

👆 Point-and-Click Adventures

Story-driven projects for any subject — rooms, characters, inventory, and dialogue woven together.

Same nickname logins · zero ads · one-click HTML export to your LMS. See all the game types →

Launch lesson plans

Ready-to-teach escape rooms.
Built for the classroom.

Three classroom demos, playable right now. Try them all.

Play Now 🧪 Science

Smart Escape: Science Museum

Locked in the museum after hours. Help fellow visitors with their problems, solve four puzzles, and pick up facts about planets, electricity, and dinosaurs as you find your way home.

Grades 4–6 Length ~15 min
Play Demo →
Play Now 📜 ELA

Smart Escape: Library

Locked in the library after hours. Return four missing books and solve word puzzles (synonyms, anagrams, vowel counts) to find your way home.

Grades 6–8 Length ~25 min
Play Demo →
Play Now 🏛 History

Smart Escape: Egypt

Sealed inside an ancient Egyptian tomb. Decode hieroglyphs, solve pyramid puzzles, and uncover the secrets of the pharaohs to find your way back to daylight.

Grades 5–8 Length ~20 min
Play Demo →
Every classroom escape room is included with a teacher account. Each includes a printable teacher guide, learning objectives, vocabulary list, and post-play discussion prompts. Create your account to get them as they release.
Aligned with
Common Core ELA Common Core Math NGSS Engineering Design ISTE 1.4 Innovative Designer ISTE 1.6 Creative Communicator 21st Century Critical Thinking
For your IT officer

Privacy & safety, built in.

✓
No ads, ever
On any page. To anyone. On any tier. Nothing to filter, nothing to approve.
✓
No student personal info
A class code and a teacher-chosen nickname. No real names, emails, passwords, birthdays, or contact info.
✓
Students create, not just play
Students build their own escape games under a nickname login. Their work saves so they can keep going. Their identity isn’t stored.
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Private to the teacher
A student’s games and progress are visible only to the teacher who set up the class. Never published, sold, or shared.
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US-hosted & encrypted
Encrypted (HTTPS) connections, on access-controlled US servers. No third-party tracking pixels.
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Often no data agreement needed
Because we don’t collect student personal information, most schools can use EscapeMaker with nothing to sign. If your school runs its own review, we will answer its questions in writing: what we store, where it lives, and who can see it.
Made by a human

Why I built this.

I’m Selfdefiant. I’ve been making escape room games for 20 years, over 2,000 of them, on Coolmath Games, HoodaMath, and just about every game site your students grew up on.

If your students have ever played one in a sub-plan or a Friday brain break, you probably didn’t know it was mine. The platforms that hosted my games didn’t put my name anywhere. That’s fine. The games were the point.

But teachers kept telling me, through DMs and conference Q&As: “I wish my students could make these, not just play them.”

So I built EscapeMaker. The same engine that powered thousands of classroom Fridays now lets your students design their own escape rooms about whatever you’re teaching. No ads. No tracking. No student emails. Just the tool I would’ve wanted as a kid.

Free to try. $500 a year for a complete classroom of 25 students.

Selfdefiant
Selfdefiant
Full-stack developer & game designer · 2,000+ escape games over 20 years
FAQ

Questions schools actually ask.

Is EscapeMaker free for teachers?
Yes, you can build for free. Make a game, try it with a class, and pay nothing. You buy when your students need their own logins: a classroom is $500 a year and covers you plus 25 student seats. Teaching on your own without student logins, Builder is $9.99 a month.
Do students need accounts?
No. Teachers create a class with a 6-character join code and set up student logins using a nickname (not a real name). Students sign in with the code and nickname to play and build games. No emails, no real names, no personal data.
Do students enter any personal information?
None. There is no field anywhere for a student's real name, email, password recovery, birthday, or contact info. A student login is just a class code plus a nickname the teacher chooses. We can’t lose, sell, or expose data we never collect.
Can students build their own games, or only play?
Build. That’s the whole point. Students design their own escape rooms about what you’re teaching — writing the story, sequencing the puzzles, illustrating the scenes. Their work saves to their nickname login so they can keep going across class periods, and it’s visible only to you.
Do we need a Data Processing Agreement (DPA)?
For most schools, no. A DPA exists to govern student personal data, and we don’t collect any: no student names, emails, birthdays or contact details ever reach us. That means most schools can adopt EscapeMaker with nothing to sign. If your district’s policy requires paperwork before any tool is approved, tell us what it asks for and we will answer it in writing.
Are there ads in the classroom?
No. EscapeMaker shows zero ads on any page, to anyone, on any tier. Ever. This is the brand promise.
There are no ads, so how does EscapeMaker make money?

Two revenue streams. Both transparent.

1. Individual creators pay $9–$19/month. Hobbyists, streamers, content creators, real-world escape room operators, and marketing agencies subscribe for advanced features: watermark-free downloads, their own art and sound, custom fonts, Newgrounds medals and scoreboards, and more storage. A teacher working alone, without student logins, can use the same plan.

2. Classroom plans: $500 a year for 25 student seats. That one price covers you and the class: each student gets their own nickname login, their work saves across class periods, and you see all of it from one roster. Most schools cover this from a classroom or department budget, and we can send a quote or invoice for a purchase order if your school cannot pay by card.

Anyone can start free and build without paying anything, teachers included. No ads, no data sold, no student information collected. Ever.

What ages is this appropriate for?
Family-friendly by default. The teacher library is filtered to E-rated content. We recommend teacher-built and teacher-vetted games for grades K-4; grades 5-12 can build and play independently with teacher supervision.
Does my school need to pay anything?
You can start free and build without a card on file. A classroom is $500 a year and covers you plus 25 student logins for the whole year — that is what schools buy, and it is the point at which anything is owed. A single teacher who does not need student logins can subscribe on their own for $9.99 a month instead.
Can students take their games home?
Yes. Any game can be exported as a single HTML file and shared. Parents can play their student’s creation on any computer. No account, no install, no internet required.
How is EscapeMaker different from Kahoot, Blooket, or Genially?
Kahoot and Blooket let students play games. Genially is a general interactive-content tool. EscapeMaker is the only browser-based authoring tool built specifically for escape rooms, and the only one where students design the games themselves as their assignment. Plus: one-click HTML export to host the games anywhere, with zero ads.
Start your classroom

$500 a year. 25 student seats.

One price for you and up to 25 students, for the whole year: every student gets their own login, no student email addresses or personal information are collected, and everything the class builds stays private to the class.

Create My Teacher Account →