The time is now 5 Noon

In My Humble Opinion
1

How’s that for a hook?*

I have inflicted upon myself organizing and conducting an Escape Room activity in English for my school’s lower-level 12th grade students prior to their finals next month. The school is in Beijing, China. The real purpose of the activity is to trick them into reviewing for the finals of all of their six subjects by solving puzzles related to those subjects. All of us teachers hope the students will also have fun.

An example puzzle which the students have already worked for my class (Academic English) was solved in 23 minutes by one student. She was very excited. The prologue/introduction to the student was:

Good morning, Mr/Ms ___________________. I hope you are enjoying your scrambled eggs. This morning, a prominent citizen of our city was murdered. Your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to find out where the killer is hiding. These questions will guide you to the killer. Please remember that when everything is fine, Sailors say, “It is on an even keel”.

This prologue was followed by 12 questions relating to our course material to that point. Instead of the usual ABCD choices for the answers, I labeled the answers XYVT for Q1, KLMN for Q2, and so on for all 12 questions. Those choices were to get the first part of the 6-character escape code; those labels are a clue also.

The prologue’s content is very important because it contains three clues:

  1. Scrambled eggs. Scrambled tells you the letters you find for the code will be scrambled or mixed up.
  2. Where. The code must be a location.
  3. Even keel. Just use the letters for the even-numbered questions.

So, the escape code was SCHOOL.

Of course, while they were working that puzzle, I had the lights dimmed somewhat and the Mission Impossible soundtrack playing and a “dead body” ooutline on the floor with evidence number markers spread around the classroom. In keeping with that, the actual escape room activity for which the students will be marked by their other teachers for demonstrating 21st Century skills (innovation, teamwork, and so on) is going to be a murder mystery. I like those and, more important, so do the students.

My issue is I cannot think of ten good questions for the after-action survey. What questions would you ask in such a survey.

*The whole question is:

The time is now 5 noon. What time does school begin Monday?

The actual schedule has 1st period beginning at 08:30, each class lasting 45 minutes with a 10-minute break between classes, lunch from 12:00 to 13:50, and the 8th period ending at 17:20.

Feel free to try that one in addition to adding some survey questions. My co-teachers and I will choose the best ten and give you credit.

TIA.

2

I’m not sure exactly how you are supposed to interpret 5 noon, but here is a spoilered guess

You are changing the time system so that the day has 10 hours instead of 24, so that instead of 12 Noon you have 5 noon. Extending this, perhaps you are on an overall decimal time system. 8:30 is 8.5 hours past midnight which is (8.5/24) =0.35417. So school begins at 3:54.17 more or less

I don’t know what level of math your students know but if they know some basic geometry and a bit of algebra here is an interesting question that sounds like it might be difficult and will be if you come at it the wrong way, but if you think of it the right way is pretty easy.

I have a tape that is 10 km long and 1mm thick, and a roll it up into a very tight spiral, approximately how many wraps around the spiral do I get before I run out of tape. The solution is spoiled below.

You could solve it by calculating the length of each successive wrap and add them up until you get longer than the length but a much easier way is to consider the cross sectional area of the tape. A 10km long by 1mm tape will have a rectangular cross section of 10 square meters. If I roll it up into a spiral, it will still have the same cross section but will now be a circle. The area of that circle with be piR^2 = 10 sq.m, Doing a little algebra gets you R=sqrt(10/pi) meters. or 1.784 meters. This radius is made up of successive layers of tape each 1mm thick. So there must be about 1,784 layers to make the radius. Q.E.D.

Another geometry problem that is very straight forward but which has a very unintuitive answer.

The planet Zorb is a perfect sphere 10,000 km in diameter. For reasons only know to the Zorbians, the decided at great expense to run a long piece of cable tightly along the ground to encircle the planet equator. The problem was that people kept tripping over it. So someone proposed that it might be better if they extended the cable a bit so that it would be loose enough that it could be 2 meters off the ground at all points around at all points along the equator. But the High galumphate in charge was worried about the cost of the extra cable on an already overly expensive project. How much extra cable has to be added to make this adjustment?

A) a little over 12 meters
B) a little over 12 km
C) a little over 120 km
D) a little over 1200 km

Answer spoiled below.

It only takes about 12.6 meters of cable. If R is the radius of the planet the length of the original circumference was 2piR. If we increase the radius by one meter then the circumference is 2pi(R+2) or 2piR +4pi, so it only takes 4pi meters or 12.56 meters of cable.

3

You got the 5 noon question right! One of my 11th grade students accidentally saw the question and he got it in approximately 3 minutes. He also said, “We better not use that system. You’ll steal six real minutes from us!” So, of course, I asked him why he said that. His response: “Nobody’s starting work or school at 3.54; they’ll start at 3.50; you know, half past”.

I’m looking for after-action survey questions. “Was it fun?” “Was it interesting?” sound like boring questions for me. The survey is to find out what the students thought about the activity.

I showed your questions to the math teacher. We’ll see if she likes them for a future escape room.