Escape Room Activity for Middle School: A Creative Classroom Experience

I’m thrilled to introduce you to Miss Christie Goodwin, a creative and passionate history, art, and English teacher based in Budapest. Christie teaches middle school and loves the opportunity to blend subjects in fun and engaging ways. I first met her when she was a student at Grove City College. She was a mover and shaker even then! Christie recently created an incredible escape room activity for middle school students, and I’m so excited to share her experience with you in her own words.

A Budapest-Inspired Escape Room Activity for Middle School

Budapest is famous for its escape rooms—immersive games filled with puzzles and logic challenges—so it felt only natural for Christie to bring that concept into her classroom. With a long school break approaching, she designed a spooky, cross-curricular escape room to help her 6th-grade Hungarian students review key concepts from literature, exam prep, history, and art.

The result? Her students had a blast and thanked her for the experience; it was definitely a success!

Setting the Stage

Christie’s classroom is filled with cupboards and drawers, which make it the perfect setting for hiding puzzle sheets, keys, codes, props, and locked boxes. She used a combination of PowerPoint and Google Forms to guide the escape room digitally and added themed props to set the mood.

The Adventure Begins

As students entered the room, the BBC Sherlock theme music played, and the title “Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Red Mask” appeared on the screen. Three students read a short introduction to set the scene, and the escape room officially began.

Solving the Mystery

With 26 students and only 45 minutes, Christie had to plan carefully. She divided the class into four teams and gave them time to collect artifacts and puzzles from around the room. Each team worked through a variety of challenges, including:

• Matching literary devices

• Solving Morse code puzzles

• Creating acronyms from vocabulary words

• Decoding Caesar ciphers

• Competing in a Quizlet Live challenge

• Completing physical tasks like crawling and tossing a ball

• Analyzing news articles about Sherlock Holmes

Each time a team solved a puzzle, they entered their answer into a Google Form, which unlocked the next section and linked to additional resources.

The Grand Finale

The final puzzle involved a red mask worn by the winner of Quizlet Live. Inside the mask was a key that opened a locked box containing a transparent compass overlay for the Caesar cipher wheel. When students solved the final code, they escaped—just as the bell rang!

Christie celebrated with high-fives and personalized congratulations for each student. The excitement was contagious, and her students haven’t stopped asking when they can do another escape room.

This escape room activity for middle school is a fantastic example of how creativity and cross-curricular planning can transform review sessions into unforgettable learning experiences.

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