Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Astronomy Escape Room

We are studying Apologia's Astronomy textbook this semester and for our chapter about Earth I decided to do an Escape Room.  If you've never done one of these before they are super popular right now.  Basically the idea is that your team is "locked" in a room and must solve puzzles to escape.
We went to a fun Escape Room on vacation with my in-laws, but they are very expensive so I wrote one for my class to do.
There are three puzzles the kids had to solve and it took them about 30 minutes.  I was in the room, but I didn't help them at all.  They had to work together as a team.
I began by explaining that they were all junior scientists working for NASA and they had to stop a meteor from hitting the Earth by launching a rocket to explode the meteor.  However, their boss had the code and he was stuck in traffic!  They needed to solve the puzzles in the room to get the final code word to save the Earth!

The first puzzle was a layers of the Earth puzzle that went along with chapter five of the Apologia book.  I wrote the code and instructions to unlock the box for the next puzzle on various layers and they had to put it together in order to get the order and numbers for the lock.

Here is a picture of the box.  Inside was all the components (except water) for the next puzzle (also from the book), a compass.

Figuring out the puzzle

In this picture you can see them working on the first puzzle, the green lockbox with the compass pieces, the water, and the final word lock which is the brown bag.

The instructions for the compass were in their notebooks which I gave them in the room.  The rule was they could use anything in the room, but they could not leave the room to get anything.

The compass instructions included the clue to check all four directions for their next puzzle.  I wrote on the various space posters with invisible ink pens and had blacklight flashlights for them to use.  This was a HUGE hit!  They were SO SO SO excited when they found these clues.

You can see the clue in the light above

Each letter had a symbol by it...

They had to check the book to see what symbol went with what planet

Then they had to put the planet symbols in order to spell out the final mystery word

The final word to unlock the room was "solar"

The prize for finishing?  Earth cookies of course!  The kids all LOVED the hands-on way of reviewing what we learned about with the Earth.  I am planning on writing another Escape Room when we study the weather...stay tuned ;)