Locked in for Adventure: How BHS Is Using Escape Rooms to Educate
- EricJones
- May 10, 2023
- 2 min read
Baldwin High School is demonstrating the use of Innovative teaching methods to help students learn while having fun. One such method is the themed Escape Rooms created by Media Specialist Pamela Longino. Longino has designed various escape rooms, including a Pi Day themed escape room for the math department, and team building rooms for student council and Chick-fil-A Leader Academy, and a poetry-themed room for National Poetry Month. "It's fun!" said Longino, "They enjoy it. It gets them up. It gets them moving around. They're not just reading a textbook. Everybody wants to get to the final destination room first and I give prizes for the first team that escapes the room."
Longino's escape rooms require students to use teamwork and critical thinking skills to solve problems. These rooms are not only exciting, but they also encourage students to use literacy skills, including figurative language and vocabulary. Each station in the poetry-themed escape room focuses on the anatomy of a poem, such as lines, stanzas, and repetition. The poetry room was specifically designed for English classes. However, one teacher was so excited about the content that she thought it would be a great way to prepare her students for their upcoming AP exams. Other teachers said it helped them prepare their students for Milestone assessments.
Literary AP Student McKinsey Pennamon, who has done actual escape rooms in the past, has participated in two of Longino’s escape rooms and said she would “one-thousand percent” like to do more. “I like challenges. I like to solve brain puzzles,” she said, “with the educational part, you’ve got to take a second to stop and think about it.”
In the poetry escape room, students are locked into various coffee shops, such as Blackbird, Morning Grind, Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks, and My Nook, which are all local businesses. "I actually reached out to the coffee shops," Longino said, "and they gave me free coffee mugs and free stuff to put their label on for my coffee shop tables." The students must unlock each coffee shop to obtain a puzzle piece to complete the final puzzle. The puzzle contains a code that unlocks the final destination room.
Longino's goal is to create an escape room for every month to allow teachers to utilize the rooms throughout the year. These escape rooms will be designed to go along with the teachers' curriculum and to implement literacy skills. These escape rooms are just another way that Baldwin High School is demonstrating out-of-the-box thinking to help students grasp challenging concepts.
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