REPORTAGE. This Yvelines high school offers an “escape game” to convince students to choose the scientific stream

How to interest high school students in physics-chemistry and mathematics? “Lock them in a room!”, could answer the teachers of the Le Corbusier high school, in Poissy in the Yvelines. Not to force them to study, but to make them solve an “escape game”, named after these very fashionable role-playing rooms, which inspired an educational project for the establishment’s teams.

“Here we are looking for a code to open the padlock!” In a room transformed for the occasion, a team of students and supervisors are busy trying to unlock the secrets of a wooden chest. LFiltered light, red cinema seats, popcorn, large film posters… The decor is neat. The mechanisms to be manipulated include position detectors, light detectors, temperature probes. The puzzles are programmed by computer coding. The players are amazed: “Honestly, it’s very well done!”

At the origin of this project which brings together around thirty second-year students: science teachers who are very annoyed to see fewer and fewer young people choosing their discipline. They were, for example, more than 70, this year, in specialty physics chemistry in first.

Thanks to this idea ofescape room, the figure has risen to 110 for the next school year. As much as before the last reform of Jean-Michel Blanquer’s high school, pointed out by Vincent Perrin, one of the teachers: “This reform has done us very, very badly. We have seen a fairly significant drop in students in science courses. So we tried to react by setting up this system”.

Perrine is one of those convinced students. Next year, she will study maths, physics and SVT. “I didn’t really know what to choose between the literary and the scientific, she confides. But the project allowed me to understand that science was more my thing!” Making learning concrete is also what appealed to Alice, 15, “with normal lessons, we sometimes ask ourselves the question of what it’s for… There, we know!”

A project which, on the other hand, required a great deal of commitment on the part of the young people and teachers who devoted a great deal of their free time to it.