An escape room is a themed challenge event where players collaborate as a team to find clues, complete tasks and solve a variety of puzzles.

Chris Correia, who is a sixth-grade teacher at Brock Elliott Elementary School, engaged 32 students in his classroom on Friday morning on the Math-focused escape room exercise.

“The objective is to make learning fun,” he said.

Correia, who has been at the Manteca Unified school site for the past four years, conducted a similar-type activity in the summer on a smaller scale consisting of 10 players.

He thought about incorporating the activity where the aim is to achieve a specific, time-bound goal – usually to escape from somewhere – to this year’s students, given their physical and social restrictions as fifth graders due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They had no interaction last year. My hope here was to re-train them to collaborate with one another – it was good to see them interacting,” Correia said.

One of the stations in the escape room activity consisted of the hidden blocks. Students needed to retrieve six pieces in forming the Math equation.

“They had to solve the problem to move on,” said the Brock Elliott teacher.

Correia did help those who were stuck solving the problem in order to get them “back on the right track.”

He’s planning to do another escape room activity, using English Language / Arts as the theme.

This is one of his ways of developing culture, citizenship, and collaboration in the classroom.