Escape rooms are life-size puzzles which require a group of people, sometimes strangers, to work together to solve riddles.

Creating an escape room requires some of the same skills, as a group of Tamaqua residents are finding out.

The Tamaqua Arts Center has partnered with the Raiders STEP-Up club at Tamaqua Area High School to create an escape room in a home in the borough. The goal is to create a fun activity for kids while building connections in the community, and steering kids away from drugs, according to Leona Rega, director of the Tamaqua Community Arts Center.

“Escape rooms are kind of the up-and-coming activity right now. So we thought a way to engage students with organizations in the community, with adults, and also with some lifelong learning skills, was to actually have them be the developers of this,” Rega said.

The escape room is expected to be open to the public on weekends in February. Final dates will be announced closer to the opening.

Escape rooms can cost more than $20, but the Arts Center is hoping to keep the cost low so families can enjoy an escape room on a budget.

The idea came about after the arts center and Raiders STEP-Up club met to discuss things for students to do in the Tamaqua area.

A diverse group of stakeholders — everyone from contractors and IT professionals to middle school gifted students — are contributing in some way to make the project a reality.

Ruth Gardiner, Tamaqua school director of special education, decided it would be a good idea to get the middle school students involved. They went on a field trip to an escape room in Hershey, and immediately had ideas about how they would make their own.

“I suggested it would be fun to get the middle school kids involved in designing the questions — the riddles — the items, the gadgets we’re going to do in our escape room,” Gardiner said.

The gifted class at Tamaqua Area Middle School brainstormed ideas for one of the two escape rooms.

Players in the escape room will be faced with a situation where they have been transported back to the 1950s through a mishap with a time capsule, and must solve clues in order to escape.

“Our guests are entering a 1950s home and they will basically be assembling the parts of the time capsule, finding the clues to get out of the house. The time capsule has to do with the history of Tamaqua,” Gardiner said.

Over the next two months the students will work on their portion of the escape room.

They’ll be joined by older students later in the progress, who will get more hands-on creating the project using skills that fall under STEAM — science, technology, engineering, arts and math.

That could include construction, designing art, or working with computers and cameras that will be part of the final product.

They’ll also get involved in marketing and planning the actual event — down to shuttles which will take players from the arts center to the house where the escape room is held.

“We’re taking students out of the school setting to work in real-life experiences with professionals in each of those fields to develop and design what we need for this escape room,” Rega said.

And because the mission is twofold, the goal is to have students build connections with their community along the way.

Rega said that these days, many kids don’t feel a connection to the town they grew up in, and their goal is to make students care more about Tamaqua.

“We want to make sure we build that community, and build it with a real purposeful mission of something educational that they’ll take out of it,” Rega said.