In Ms. Updike's English 12 Honors Dystopian Literature course, students survived a zombie escape room! The seniors collaborated in teams to practice "survival" skills while engaging in a thematic understanding of the course, specifically focusing on the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic genres of zombie narratives as well as the utopian-dystopian dichotomy within Young Adult fiction, such as Lois Lowry's "The Giver."
The escape room required them to read an atlas, comb through texts for hidden symbols, letters, and alphanumerical decoding, and use deductive and inference skills, among other traits. Although the escape room occurred post-Halloween, the game happened strategically two weeks before exam week as a welcomed stress-relief and engagement and motivation strategy, especially to combat "senioritis" and to imbue additional fond memories of their shortening time at Shorecrest.
This was the culminating game for the semester among
Human Clue,
Cannibal Land, Jeopardy, Heads Up, Tic Tac Toe, paper basketball, etc. in preparation for finishing their fifth book of the course and their final Qualitative Research Paper.
