Escaping Class

It’s dark, and the smell of gasoline is strong. Where are you? It must be a garage; the floor is slick and hard, and rough rope burns around your wrists. Knowing that your captor is sleeping just on the other side of the door, you must whisper to your fellow captives. Suddenly, the girl next to you finds a clue, but you all freeze. There’s rustling on the other side of the door.

Is this a horror story or an escape game? Thankfully the latter, although in a place no one would expect it: a middle school classroom.

Mary Sue Fleischauer is a gifted specialist who teaches a one-credit class called “Mysteries Abound” for 6-8 graders at Cedar Ridge Middle School. In the class, they study mysteries in literature (such as Sherlock Holmes), as a genre, in nature (such as the Fibonacci sequence), and even in historical events which remain unsolved to this day.

As the final project for this class, the 20 students invented 4 escape rooms (in groups of 5) to test their skills in mystery. “I didn’t want them to just write a mystery story—it would’ve been too much like English class,” Fleischauer says. “So I asked them to create a mystery escape room.”

But before creating their own, the class headed over to Trapped In Decatur for some inspiration. They completed three escape rooms (only one group couldn’t escape), and came back to class pumped about making their own.

Heads down in fervent discussion, the students decided on a theme for each of their rooms, resulting in four different themes.

1.       Nursery where a baby had been kidnapped (this room is reminiscent of a class lecture covering the Charles Lindbergh story).

2.       Jail cell

3.       Insane asylum

4.       Hostage in the garage of Tai Lopez (this room was actually two, so that even after breaking out of the garage, players still had to sneak past sleeping Tai inside his house. If they were too loud, Tai would wake up and lock players back in the garage to start all over again).

Using their classroom as the escape room, the class began building clues and scheming clever ways to lock their classmates inside the four rooms. Fleischauer provided locks, but otherwise the class created their own props and supplies, even building walls out of folding tables.

Once the rooms were constructed, teachers signed up to bring students from other classes for 20-minute sessions. Several enterprising children found creative ways to come twice because they loved it so much!

Fleischauer saw the escape rooms as a winning experience that not only emphasized mystery, but also taught communication, teamwork, leadership, organization, and cooperation. Without successfully incorporating all of the above, breaking out of an escape room is nearly impossible, and building one is even harder.

Fleischauer first became interested in escape rooms when she did one with her daughter in Atlanta. Since then, she has looked for them in many cities and loves breaking out of the mystery rooms with her family. She knew her gifted students would love them just as much, so she decided to integrate them into her teaching methods.

Fleischauer is one of seven gifted specialists who work in this district with children in 1st to 8th grades. The school district selects children for the gifted programs in 2nd grade using a Child Find Procedure which analyzes and identifies them as gifted based on their aptitude, performance, and characteristics.

Children who qualify are placed in gifted learning groups that cater to their accelerated learning needs. Despite the stigma of being an elite group of students, Fleischauer is careful to describe gifted students as students who still go through the same problems as other children. “We have gifted kids from all socioeconomic levels, backgrounds, ethnicities, and cultures who need the same classes, just at a greater depth of understanding and pace of teaching,” Fleischauer says.

For more pictures of their escape room experiences, visit their Facebook page: cedarridgemiddleschool152