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EMC² Blog

Inside The Design: Memory Manor

Hi folks! John here.

If there’s one thing Michael and I love about designing classroom resources, it’s the challenge of
making something that is deeply engaging, highly accessible, and endlessly replayable—without requiring hours of setup or advanced planning for teachers. Our latest resource, Memory Manor, is a perfect example of how we blend game-based mechanics, immersive storytelling, and low-prep instructional design to create experiences that work in any classroom, any subject, and for any age group.

In this game, students will work in teams, pushing their thinking to recall and share as much information as possible about your current unit of study. To do so, they’ll complete all sorts of tasks like drawing pictures, writing higher order thinking questions, and filling out custom-made graphic organizers that can quickly be tailored to suit the unique needs of whatever you happen to be teaching. It can be used as a review day game, or in place of a traditional lecture to give students the chance to dive right into their textbooks to mine as much content as they can from whatever chapter lies before them. And if we’ve done it right (and we certainly hope we have!), students will end up generating a TON of top quality work products while actually having a whole lot of fun as they do so.

If this all sounds too good to be true, we invite you to join us as we go Inside the Design on a journey through all the thought and effort we put into “making fun of learning” by creating gamified resources that are meticulously engineered to maximize student engagement (without creating any extra work for teachers). And if you stick around through the end of today’s blog post, we’re even sharing a 100% free copy of this classroom game with you with absolutely zero strings attached so you can likewise put the power of play to work in your very own classroom!

Like every great game, this project started with research. And a feeling.

Step 1: Set The Mood

Gamification pioneer, author, and Fortune 100 consultant Yu-Kai Chou often talks about how the best games start with emotion, not mechanics. But once you’ve pinpointed how you want your players to feel, the question becomes: How can we, as teachers, infuse research-backed “best practices” into activities our students will not only stomach, but hunger for? Dr. Susan Engel’s concept of ‘desired difficulty,’ as explored in her book The Hungry Mind, was central to the design of Memory Manor. The feeling we were shooting for is one of endless curiosity. And so the goal was to create challenges that are just hard enough to stretch students’ abilities while keeping them deeply engaged—a balance between effort and reward that research shows can drive unmatched levels curiosity and intrinsic motivation. 

And to that same end, we needed a theme that evoked a feeling. 

We didn’t want just another classroom game where students mindlessly complete tasks for points—we needed something that practically screamed “mystery and challenge.” Almost to the point where we wanted them to feel like they were stepping into an eerie, ever-changing world, where the very walls seem to shift around them. Kinda’ like a living escape room, when you think about it.

For a splash of visual inspiration that captures the spooky, sepia-toned aesthetic we were aiming for, think back to those moody, slow-burn music videos from the ‘90s—the ones drenched in double exposure candlelight and shadow, where time felt warped and the whole world existed in a strange, dreamlike haze.

Aside from the fact that so many of these songs are undeniable ‘bangers’ (as the kids say), what we’ve always loved about so many of those mysterious, brooding music videos from the ’90s is their haunting, ethereal quality. Live, Counting Crows, even Sarah Maclachlan (just not that dog shelter commercial video!)—countless alt-rock standouts filled MTV’s rotation with haunting, unforgettable storytelling—videos that lingered long after the final frame, almost as if they were whispering some powerful, profound secret. Candlelit rooms flicker in shadow, time feels warped, and the world exists in this strange, dreamlike haze. THAT was exactly the feeling we were looking to capture in Memory Manor.

To help bring this vision to life, we turned to AI tools as creative collaborators. Using ChatGPT, we asked for a description of this type of these music videos’ visual and emotional vibe (hint: we’ve included it again in the previous paragraph), then took that same summary into MidJourney, where we began experimenting with different prompts to bring the vision to life.

The process wasn’t instant—far from it! We iterated on dozens of designs, tweaking prompts and refining outputs until we landed on the perfect balance of warmth, shadow, and mystery. Along the way, we created an entire gallery of images, each one pushing us closer to the final look. We’re even including an image carousel below to share some of the concepts that didn’t make the cut, so you can see how much thought and care went into getting this just right

AI tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney can be powerful assistants, but as Guy Kawasaki so famously said: “Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.” It’s not about the tool—it’s about how you use it. By combining the aesthetic inspiration from the video with our focus on clarity and usability for teachers, we were able to create a resource that feels every bit as engaging as it looks.

Again, a great game is all about evoking the right feeling! And drawing from Dr. Engel’s research and the aesthetics that inspired the entire design process in the first place, we wanted to bring that same sense of thoughtful (and, ok, a little bit eerie) discovery into this resource—making students feel like they were moving through a place that was familiar, yet unsettlingly different every time they returned.

And for that, we turned to our beloved and ever-reliable world of board games. Enter The Night Cage…

Step 2: Build the Mechanics

For Christmas, I was gifted a copy of The Night Cage board game. And though I’d never seen or heard of it before, I was immediately fascinated.

Game mechanics, in simple terms, are the rules and systems that define how a game is played—the ‘engine’ that drives player choices and interactions. And this cooperative game challenges players to work together while flipping tiles that lead their pawns toward the escape from an infinite labyrinth of darkness. But with every move that you make, each step forward causes the path behind you to vanish. It’s a brilliantly simple mechanic that makes every move feel important—you can never fully know what’s coming, and there’s no going back. 

Ooooh. Now we’re getting somewhere!

See how the the storyline and mechanics at play in this board game echo the aesthetic and emotional notes we’re trying to elicit for this classroom resource? (Also of note: peep those sweet sepia tones and spooky shadows in the game board image above? Great minds think alike!). That shadowy, twisting sense of unpredictability and surprise became the heart of Memory Manor: every time students revisit a room, it changes, evolves, and demands more of them.

But we didn’t stop there.

To ensure that our Memory Manor classroom activity was every bit as balanced and accessible as it was aesthetically pleasing, we looked once more to the world of games, this time taking our cue from the engine-building brilliance of Wingspan
—a game that I have been playing a ton of lately. Wingspan’s genius lies in its engine-building mechanics: every decision feeds into a growing system, and the more you invest in one area (lay eggs, gain food, or draw cards), the more powerful your overall scoring potential becomes. One hand starts washing the other, so to speak. And we wanted to bring that same sense of long-term strategy into Memory Manor, where students must decide whether to deepen their mastery in one room or expand their knowledge across multiple rooms—that way, they’re organically being nudged to explore multiple modalities of play (err… work?). 

We’d be lying if we said we didn’t get super nerdy about the numbers behind this one. As much as we wanted Memory Manor to feel open-ended and strategic, we also had to make sure the leveling system and power-ups encouraged a balanced playstyle—without allowing one single strategy to overpower all others.

When students enter a room in Memory Manor, they’re prompted to complete tasks that challenge them in different ways. Whether it’s sketchnoting, crafting higher-order thinking questions, or creating quick builds with LEGO, each room has a unique focus designed to encourage creative, critical thinking. The twist? The deeper you go into a room, the more it asks of you. The first visit might require just one task, but as students return, the challenges—and the rewards—escalate.

(The Night Cage, meet Wingspan. Wingspan, meet The Night Cage).

Like any well-balanced board game, Memory Manor needed a structured scoring system—one that encouraged students to explore broadly while also deepening their mastery over time. If revisiting the same room over and over was the best way to win, the game would feel repetitive. If moving randomly with no depth was too rewarding, students wouldn’t engage in the deeper mechanics of revisiting rooms.

So we math-ed it out. We structured checkpoint rewards, point scaling, and leveling incentives so that students are naturally nudged to explore broadly and build deeply at the same time. The onboarding process had to be smooth—with no confusing mechanics to slow down new players—but there had to be enough depth that competitive students could optimize their paths and feel like they were crafting their own strategy.

It sounds obvious, but it’s worth repeating: here at EMC² Learning, we design our resources for a community of thousands of teachers all over the world, so our goal is always to find the perfect balance between structured gameplay and open-ended exploration. Educators are pressed for time as it is, so every resource we design needs to be ready to roll in our classrooms with an easy onboarding system for students and minimal prep required for teachers. This wasn’t just a “cool idea” thrown together—we put the same level of precision and iteration into Memory Manor that board game designers do when testing and refining a new release.

Total time we spent designing this resource? About 15 hours.

Total time it should take a teacher to learn how it works and start using it in their classroom? About 10 minutes.

Let’s go under the hood and show you how it’s done!

Step 3: Get in the Game

One of the most exciting things about Memory Manor is how easy it is to swap in and out different challenges to fit the specific needs of any classroom. We know that no two teachers (or subject areas) are alike, so we designed this game-like resource to be fully modular and adaptable for ANY content area, and ANY grade level.

In the base version of the game, we provide a default set of challenges that teachers can use as-is or modify however they see fit. We’ve even included a placeholder slide that outlines a bank of suggested activities that you can copy and paste right into your presentation to help your classes get started even faster.

But, as with every EMC² Learning resource, Memory Manor is fully editable—so you’re never locked into a one-size-fits-all approach. Want to tweak a challenge? Go for it. Swap in a new one? More power to you! Create a fully custom set of tasks? The world is your oyster, friend. The game structure stays intact, but you have the freedom to align the challenges to your classroom’s unique needs.

And just like every other resource we design here at EMC² Learning, Memory Manor comes complete with a fully editable version of the game slides, including all required activity scorecards and student instructions. So all you have to do is print, project, and play.

We hope this deep dive into Memory Manor gives you a glimpse of the time, thought, and care that goes into every EMC² Learning resource. We’re serious about playful learning done right, and we’ve created more than 900 activities (and counting!) that help teachers and students discover a better way to play in their classrooms. And through it all, there are never any low level guessing games. No low mindless button mashing. No crass simulations, and no dinky worksheets. We don’t just slap some cute clipart onto an everyday lesson and call it a day—we blend mechanics, storytelling, and strategy to create classroom experiences that feel every bit as engaging as the best board games and video games.

If you’re ready to transform your classroom into an interactive, immersive learning space, Memory Manor is here for you. And it’s totally free.

Can’t wait to hear what you think!

The activity featured in this blog post is just a sample of the 900+ resources available and on their way to arrive shortly in the EMC² Learning library. This entire library is available to all members with an active account to our resources, and is included with your annual site membership. We hope you’ll consider joining us as an Engagement Engineer to unlock a full year of site accessFor complete details including our exclusive limited time offer for annual site membership, click here.

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