It’s December, and you know what that means- an exhibition! 

This was my third exhibition, and it was difficult. Instead of creating an inquiry project, like last December, or an invention, like last June, we did something different. We created an immersive experience based off of our Chemical Stories. 

Have you ever been to an escape room? It’s a room where you have to solve clues in to ‘escape.’ Escape rooms are so popular not only because they’re great team-building exercises, but also they have such a strong story that you really feel transported to the world of the escape room. Well, our class visited one a few weeks ago, and we basically made an escape room without the need to escape. We took the stories we created in our Chemistry Stories Unit, and converted them into immersive experiences! But, there was one more twist- it wasn’t just our story! We had to combine our story with another group’s story, then create an immersive experience about the finished product.

Amelia and I were paired with Sam, Caleb, and Jackson. Their story was about a robber who stole some electrons, which had the same idea of using electrons as currency. Since our story was about a fancy gala where one character owes the other money, we decided to make it so that the character who got robbed owed someone at the gala money. 

Our story had four characters, Harry, who got robbed, Cory, who volunteered at the gala and lent money to Harry, Sophia, who was Harry’s older sister and was in love with Corey, and Olivia, the person who stole the money in the first place. Each character had a corresponding element on the Periodic Table. Harry was hydrogen, as he lent money back and forth (or shared electrons) with Corey, who was Chlorine, which formed a Hydrogen Chloride compound. Corey also had another compound, with Sofia, who was Sodium. Sofia payed for Corey’s ticket to the gala, giving him the electron he needed. They formed Sodium Chloride, or salt. Olivia, the robber, was Oxygen, as she needed more electrons, but she never met anyone in our story that she could get them from.  

Before we could create the immersive experience, we needed to actually write out the story. I worked on this, and Amelia helped edit it, adding in some important parts I missed. We tried our best to put lots of elements (ha!) from the story into our room, but it was difficult. 

Each person played a character. I was Sofia, Amelia was Olivia, Sam was Harry, and Caleb was Corey. 

We were given the Textiles room at our school to transform, which was difficult because it was huge and filled with sewing machines, mannequins, and fabric scraps. However, we already had tons of decorations, including streamers, tablecloths, curtains, paintings, and fairy lights. We used some of the curtains to section off the room, and others to cover the tables, as the tablecloths we had weren’t big enough to cover the tables. Instead, we used the tablecloths to cover up large-scale sewing projects. 

Creating the elements in our story, however, using clues like an escape room, took much longer. Thankfully, by the time we had to set up the room, we already had the clues created.

One of them, which I made, was a puzzle using cardboard and picture frame hanging strips, so you could do the puzzle on the wall. When you unscrambled the pictures, it would reveal that Amelia’s character, Olivia, had robbed Sam’s character, Harry. This was important because Harry was near the door asking people if they had seen ‘this person’, pointing to a blurry photo of Amelia. Another clue was an iPad left open on a table that Sam would direct people to. It showed a fake text conversation between ‘Corey’ and ‘Harry,’ where Corey asked for his money back. There was an empty punch bowl surrounded by napkins on the floor, as in our story Harry knocks it over while rushing towards Olivia. One of the last clues was drawn on a whiteboard- an illustration of Olivia giving Harry his money back. However, it could take some persuasion from the actors for people to look at these clues, so Sam designed a small brochure that people could look at while they wandered around. 

There were other things in the room, too, that were more just for fun or for decoration, like the dance steps on the floor to follow to ‘bond’, or the big welcoming sign splattered with painted purple flowers. In one corner of the room, there was a projector and a screen showing off the animations we had made in our Chemistry Stories unit. 

However, since we were way down the hall, it was difficult to get people to come to our room at all. So I created about 20-25 ‘Gala Tickets’, which were little pieces of cardboard that looked like raffle tickets, and while in-character, I would encourage people to take one and visit the ‘Gala.’ 

During the exhibition, we certainly had our struggles, like the curtains not staying where they were supposed to, or people not recognizing the photo of Amelia, but it was overall one of the best exhibition experiences I’ve had, especially since there were only four people transforming our room. Also, at the end, a Grade 8 who had visited the exhibition and was waiting for her friends was shocked to discover that we  had used the Textiles room, even though she had been in our room and she had classes there. That sounds like a pretty good review of our immersive experience to me. 

Thanks for reading my blog post!