Sidwell Friends middle schoolers created an intricate escape room filled with mystery, science, and logic.

When this year’s Minimester Puzzlers group chose their final project, they decided to go big. Inspired by their field trips to the Spy Museum, the Museum of Illusions, and a commercial escape room, the students worked together with History Teacher Katie Chester and Science Teacher Gabriel Koo to create their own intricate and challenging escape room.

Every escape room needs a backstory, and the students let their imaginations run. They set the escape room in an abandoned hospital where, secretly, a crazed doctor and his team were seeking to uncover the secret of biological immortality. To lure his subjects, the evil-doer told patients he was conducting experiments to cure diabetes. Reason enough to want to escape.

The culminating project of their Minimester week, the puzzlers’ escape room almost stumped several groups who tried to crack the code, including some of their administrators, teachers, and fellow students. 

“I was really impressed by the level of detail in the escape room, said Middle School Counselor Bruce Holmes. “While we tried to solve the code, I thought this is better than some of the escape rooms that I have paid for. Our students went above and beyond to create a very special experience for all who dared enter. I was very thankful for my admin team because without them, I would not have made it out!”

Holmes was part of the first faculty/staff group locked up and tasked to escape. As they grappled with clues, the student creators watched from a video feed in the library. “Seeing the staff take on our escape room was fun. So was giving them hints when they got stuck,” said Rose Steever ‘31. “I particularly enjoyed seeing Principal V. stick his hand into the ‘biohazard’ and registering his reaction.” 

This is the second year the Puzzlers have built an escape room as part of their Minimester experience. Drawing from what they had seen on their field trips, the students first had to come up with a theme. Once they had settled on the abandoned hospital, the group created—step by step, clue by clue, puzzle by puzzle—an elaborate mind web. “We started by picking our first clues and building more based on what we wanted in the room,” Olivia Varela ‘32 explained. “As a team, we broke up jobs and built each clue separately and then added them all together. It was tons of fun and really tested our puzzle-solving abilities. And watching our teachers try to solve puzzles … well, that was hilarious.” 

Unraveling the intricately woven clues to figure out the final six-digit code to unlock the room was not for the faint of heart. The hospital’s “hidden ward,” contained keys squirreled in pill bottles and in a “biohazard bucket” filled with something pink and gooey (actually oobleck). There were patient files and coded ID wrist bands, syringes filled with precise amounts of “blood,” organs from a life-size anatomic model, diary entries from hospital staff, a pigpen cipher, and, of course, a hand-coded keypad element that freed you … but only if you figured out the code within the allotted 60 minutes.

Yuki Yu ‘31 said “the best part of creating the escape room was working as a team and building on each other’s ideas.” But close behind was the experience of “watching the teachers and our classmates in the room. There was so much laughter, anxiety, and anticipation.” Summing it up, Yu described this year’s Minimester as “one of my most memorable experiences in Middle School.”