Reed’s Project Adventure Students Face Off In ‘Hunger Games’

By Eliza Hallabeck

After Reed Intermediate School Project Adventure teacher Sara Strait welcomed one of her classes outside the school’s auxiliary gymnasium on Wednesday, June 13, one student reached over to a friend, hand clamped on his shoulder, and said, “It’s been nice knowing you.”

This was the second year Ms Strait offered her adaptation of the competition described in Sandy Hook author Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, the first book in Ms Collins’s trilogy that follows main character Katniss Everdeen as she is thrown onto a path of discovering the true political structure of her country after volunteering to replace her younger sister in the Hunger Games. That event pits one boy and one girl, known as “tributes,” from each of the country’s 12 districts against each other in a game played to the death. Only one can win the Hunger Games in the book and movie, by the same title, but at Reed only one class could be named the top winning group.

As the class ventured inside the gymnasium on Wednesday, Ms Strait explained the room had been transformed into a Hunger Games course for the students to work their way through. Each class was timed, and by picking up certain objects students could help their class’s overall time. The course was a group exercise, and different classes completed the course during their time with Ms Strait.

Ms Strait told students to imagine themselves in the Hunger Games as they work their way as a team through the gymnasium.

“Think as you are climbing across the wall that you are climbing the trees,” said Ms Strait, noting one of Katniss Everdeen’s climbs in the book.

In The Hunger Games gifts from sponsors can help a tribute, and items like rubber chickens and empty water bottles were meant to symbolize those gifts. As students worked their way across the room, they could collect those items to help their class cut time from its end score.

During the obstacle version of The Hunger Games, students swung across a rope, made their way across an imagined river, and avoided dangers like a hanging balloon, symbolizing the book’s deadly tracker jackers.

“You do not want to touch them,” said Ms Strait about the symbolic tracker jackers, “because then you have to go back and do the obstacle again.”

Jane Vouros, who started the Project Adventure program at Reed and is now retired, returned for the day to help spot students as they worked their way through the course.

To help students imagine themselves in The Hunger Games, Ms Strait also had quotes from the book posted around the gymnasium.

Following the event, Ms Strait announced the winning team was Kristen Strobel’s grade six class with a time of 6 minutes and 39 seconds. Second place was awarded to Richard Neeb’s sixth grade class for its time of 7 minutes and 57 seconds, and third place was given to Kathy Erickson’s fifth grade class for its time of 7 minutes and 58 seconds.