Imagine you are in Dr. Curtis’s classroom, now decorated like a prison. You look around at your friends and realize you are locked in this room. You must solve a series of puzzles devised by the minds of your fellow MSMS students in order to escape. The clock ticks.

The MSMS Engineering Club has taken on a new project to make that imagination a reality. On Dec. 9, an interest meeting for those wanting to help build an Escape Room was held in Shackleford Engineering Lab. The meeting was open to the entire student body, not just those involved with the Engineering Club.

The meeting began with choosing a theme for the escape room. Several ideas were proposed, including an artificial intelligence-zombie taking over the world, an escape from Mars, an empty aquarium tank slowly filling up with water and angry fishes, and “Church of the Ever-Ripping Vape: Escape Room Edition,” a nod to the production put on last December by the Dramatic Performance team.

After voting, however, all of these ideas were put away in favor of “MSMS: Prison Escape.” The project is still in the early stages, but students may expect to see Dr. Curtis’ classroom decorated with some of the more infamous portions of the MSMS experience (i.e. 11:59 P.M.).

Senior Leah Pettit commented about her excitement and nervousness about the project.

“I’m excited about the idea of some of the smartest kids I know coming up with the hardest puzzles and challenges they can think of, and then trying to confuse lots of different people,” Pettit said. “I’m really nervous that we’re going to get part way through and realize nothing we’re doing makes any sense at all. Hopefully, we can actually organize this in some capacity, and we’ll end up with something really amazing.”

Pettit has lots of experience with woodworking and hidden compartments. She hopes her experience will be useful as the team designs the escape room.

Senior Campbell Rolph hopes to be a facilitator in the effort to create the difficult puzzles and challenges students will face.

“Well, my favorite part of any escape room is the clues and the puzzles. I’m not huge into engineering, so I think my strongest suit would be kind of assisting with the creation of clues and that kind of thing.”

Rolph experienced an escape room for the first time a few years ago and is excited he is now helping make one. This is the first Engineering Club project he has participated in.

Unlike Rolph, junior Trey Fant can often be found in the Engineering Shop, but has never done an escape room. Fant brings ideas to the table from escape room videos he has seen online.

“I think as MSMS students we could be able to pull it off, no problem. Also, being able to lock people in a room and make them think, that’s a pretty cool idea.”

Fant emphasizes the team effort that will go into building the escape room. He’s happy that the nature of his schedule will allow him plenty of time to come into the Engineering Lab to work on the project.

Computer science and engineering instructor Josh Crowson explained that the project is still in its very early stages. He suspects that building the escape room will involve the combination of 3D printing, woodworking, and possibly some welding.

As the first preliminary step to designing the escape room, Pettit created an email group and sent out a form to assign jobs to team members. The jobs currently include the building crew, the story designers, and the puzzle crew.

The team hopes to lock their classmates up in a completed escape room by Alumni Weekend, April 13 and 14.