All photos by Gabriela Parini Cordova.
Malden High’s Science National Honors Society hosted its second-ever annual escape room this past March 30th. The event lasted from about 2:45 PM after school to about 4:00 PM. During this event, students were allowed to try to escape from different science rooms by solving puzzles.
This is not the first time they’ve hosted an escape room though. “I wanted this year's escape room to be more interactive and different from last year's escape room,” said Ngan Nguyen, the head planner of the whole event and treasurer of SNHS.
“I liked how there was a story behind the escape room this year. All the clues are related to one another at the end of it. Last year there were only clues/riddles on slips of paper. Both were unique in their own ways,” Allison Yu, a senior student added.
The Science National Honors Society spent a long time working on the escape room so it was unique and more advanced than last year, “we used different topics from last year but we wanted to make sure to keep things fundamentally the same for future members to repeat the same formula. We had three parts: a science-themed scavenger hunt, a mini-lab experiment, and a round of trivia questions. A group of our members has been meeting since February during Flex to come up with different clues to use during the escape room with this format,” explained Edmond Chen the historian of SNHS.
To host an event like this SNHS would need some help, “I chose to help out with the escape rooms because it seemed like a unique volunteering opportunity that is different from what I've done in the past. It also seemed really fun to guide people to find out the hidden meanings behind each puzzle we set up,” said Nathan Nguyen
The event was based around a story about a mad scientist named Benny. He was obsessed with putting his friends through puzzles, however in the end they all left Benny as they thought he was insane. Benny’s dream was to make a time machine in order to kidnap participants, forcing them to play his puzzles which was now a success. Benny ultimately fell into the year 2023 kidnapping each team and bringing them to the year 1947 to solve his puzzles in order to escape back to the year 2023.
The escape rooms were held in a variety of different science classrooms each of which contained puzzles. “In order to keep the timed competition fair, every room had the same puzzles. It consisted of 4 puzzles: a density column challenge, a puzzle that created a boat image, a water challenge where participants had to get creative to move water from one cup to the next, and an encryption puzzle. This way there would be a variety of activities for the teams to go through,” described Ngan.
The event was immersive as the puzzles started requiring the team to translate a text block. On a strip of paper, there were the letters, “Hfmc qmvt cmbv'' that needed to be translated by subbing in for the letter before it in the alphabet which came out to be “Gelb plus blau.” When put into Google Translate Gelb was found to be German for yellow while blau is German for blue.
This led the participants to their next mission of pouring liquids in a specific order into a graduated cylinder to move on. There were five questions corresponding to each of the liquids on the table. The first letter of each answer to these questions was the order the participants had to pour the liquids into the graduated cylinder.
The first answer was Hydrogen which corresponded to honey then, Degrees for dish soap, Grass for green water, Omnivore for oil, and Air for alcohol.
The players were then instructed to look under the tables and they found a card with balloons on it. Inside the balloon were paper puzzle pieces, hence the team needed to pop the balloons to get the pieces out.
Once the puzzle was solved it showed you a picture of a boat that corresponded to cups of water on a desk. To complete this challenge you would have to move the water to four different cups without touching the cups. A straw was provided in order to slowly move it from cup to cup.
As the team finished this they were then led to a white board where they had to look around the classroom to find six different colored pom poms that were the final code to the escaping. There were two pink, one yellow, one blue, one purple, and one green pom poms that ended up translating to the code of 2112131516.
This was the final challenge that needed to be finished, the team had finally escaped the room! The prize for the first team to escape was a handful of candy and a feeling of accomplishment.
“At first it was a little intimidating because we had to manage a room of over 40 kids but our group leader, Ngan Nguyen, really stepped it up and kept things under control by assigning each group a chaperone and dividing them into individual rooms,” Chen commented. He continued, “I would gladly say that this year was more successful than last year just because we attracted a lot more people in gaining interest in what our club represents and because we were a lot more organized this time around in terms of time spent planning and actually monitoring the event.”
Ngan states, “the event turned out great! I had a fun time monitoring everything and the chaperones successfully guided each team. Thank you to Kathy Maglio for being our substitute advisor and thank you to the science teachers for supporting us! Every year our escape rooms get better and better!”
With the success of the escape room this year the SNHS officers have said they’d love to host another one next year so look forward to it.
