The Huge Numbers Challenge
A B2 escape room for teens built around a reading text about why huge numbers are hard to imagine, covering counting, the Pirahã people, seconds versus years, space scale models and crowds in Tokyo.
A free Escape Room for Teens at CEFR B2 level. Topic: Huge numbers.
You and your team have been locked inside the Hall of Impossible Numbers, a strange museum where every exhibit is either unimaginably large or impossibly small. The curator, who claims that humans were never designed to understand big numbers, has hidden the exit code inside nine challenges. Each…
Solve all nine puzzles, collect one letter from each, and put the letters together in order to reveal the 9-letter master code that unlocks the exit.
Puzzles
- 🔢 Puzzle 1: Born to Count: Most of us are pretty good at counting, because we have been doing it since we were very young, and we understand that 100 of something is much more than 10 of it. However, a funny thing happens when numbers become really huge: we can say them, but we can't relate them…
- 🌳 Puzzle 2: The People Without Numbers: Read the passage carefully, then decide whether each statement is true or false.
- ⏱️ Puzzle 3: How Long Is a Trillion?: One way to understand the difference between a million, a billion and a trillion is to count in seconds. A trillion makes a million look tiny! Match each amount of seconds with how long it really is.
- 🍕 Puzzle 4: The Universe on a Plate: Another idea, when something is too big to imagine, is to picture it as something smaller. Take space, for example. If you imagine our solar system, including the sun and all its planets, as the size of tiny bacteria, too small to see, then our galaxy, the…
- 🔭 Puzzle 5: Eyes on the Sky: Astronomers use their most powerful one of these to see far-away galaxies that are invisible to the human eye. Unscramble this word: PECSOLETE
- 🌌 Puzzle 6: Two Trillion of What?: For a long time, scientists believed there were only a few thousand of these in the universe, but the total number out there has now been estimated at around 2 trillion. If each one were represented by a small object, they would make a pile about 20 million…
- 🎯 Puzzle 7: Close Enough?: Scientists rarely know huge numbers precisely, which is why the text says the number of galaxies has been 'estimated at around 2 trillion'. Three of these words are used when a number is not exact. Which word does not belong?
- 🏙️ Puzzle 8: The Biggest City: people city. Tokyo any more than other has
- 🗣️ Puzzle 9: Hello, Tokyo!: The writer is used to the sight of his team's stadium with 30,000 people in it, so he likes to imagine big numbers of people in relation to that. However, Tokyo has a population of more than 36 million people, which would fill around 1,200 stadiums, so he tried thinking…
Printable worksheet
This Escape Room comes with a free printable worksheet: 1 part for students to do after the game, and an answer key for the teacher. It prints at three levels (Support, Core and Challenge); this is the Challenge sheet. Sign in free to print the whole sheet.
What's on the worksheet
- Escape on paper · Open every lock. Fewer options to choose from this time.
Part 1: Escape on paper
Open every lock. Fewer options to choose from this time.
- 🔢 Puzzle 1: Born to Count Most of us are pretty good at counting, because we have been doing it since we were very young, and we understand that 100 of something is much more than 10 of it. However, a funny thing happens when numbers become really huge: we can say them, but we can't relate them to…
- 🌳 Puzzle 2: The People Without Numbers Read the passage carefully, then decide whether each statement is true or false. Our ability to use exact numbers, however, was not something that early humans needed or discussed. Even today, there is a tribe of hunter-gatherers living in the Amazon…
- ⏱️ Puzzle 3: How Long Is a Trillion? One way to understand the difference between a million, a billion and a trillion is to count in seconds. A trillion makes a million look tiny! Match each amount of seconds with how long it really is. A million seconds A billion seconds A trillion seconds Going…