Thescienceweteach

One of my Leadership classes is focusing on creating an escape room together. This was something we started last year and included in our Halloween Stomp. This year, we have been working on it as a way to apply leadership through solving problems together. The purpose behind this project is this:

1. It creates unity when students work together to reach a goal and help each other solve problems. The main point of escape rooms is to problem-solve to reach the solution—the same works for creating one. Each problem had to be solved first. Students have been coming up with storylines, puzzles, and clues, and then working together to make them happen.
2. Students can invite friends and family to see the result and share in the pride of a job well done. They gain a sense of ownership in the school as they create something useful and real that draws people together.
3. AI has helped establish steps to create things we might be stuck on. The goal is to learn how to use AI in a responsible way to help us create, so they grow up learning to use it to assist them and not to replace them.
4. Creating an escape room can be expensive. To keep costs down and teach about repurposing and reducing waste, we use as many used materials and donations as possible.
5. Cross-curricular work. Escape rooms include STEM, art, writing, drama, and basically anything you want to include. For us, we have been making a sarcophagus with wood, paper mache, and paint, creating mazes and paintings, codes and engineering locks. One student from the programming class has gone as far as to get help from their bishop to make what is called a “magic mirror” for our escape room. He isn’t even in our class anymore, but he loves the idea.
6. This project has been so much fun, and I can’t wait to share the results.

This is one of my favorite pieces we made for our escape room. A student came up with the idea, and we used AI to decide what pieces we would need to make this work. The participants need to find the hidden tooth and then they add that tooth and flip the other teeth in the right direction; the mouth unlocks.