Haunted houses are an essential part of spooky season. Who doesn’t love having paid actors jump out and scare the absolute snot out of you? This Halloween, the McLean STEM program created and hosted a haunted house for students to come visit. The creation of this fun and spooky activity was a project for the STEM students.

“The idea behind the haunted house is that students were supposed to develop a prop, a game or activity, and a costume that was based on a field of engineering that they were matched up with,” STEM teacher Libby Settlemyer said “They took a little personality test and that personality test matched them up with a particular field of engineering, so I grouped students based on those interests,” Settlemyer said

The entire STEM program did this project with every period collaborating to construct one haunted house. They created a Google Classroom dedicated entirely to the haunted house in order for everyone to communicate. 

 “Certain things they had to coordinate together across all the different periods, their costume number one was something that all of them had to agree upon and then they also had to figure out things like ‘my prop for first period is going to go in this particular corner of the room’ so they had to figure out where locations were going to be and not overlap with one another,” Settlemyer said

A lot of preparation and thought went into this big display. STEM has been working on this project since September. It has been a long process with all of the revisions they had to go undergo. 

“All of that [research] happened in September and in the tail end of September we discussed the project. It was all of October that they prepared their games, props, and costumes. They followed what is called the design process which is where they start by coming up with a concept and trying to refine that concept throughout. They build something really quickly to represent that concept we look at it, we test it, and we evaluate it, then we refine it. We are constantly going through revisions. It’s kind of like writing an English paper but you’re doing it with an engineering project,” Settlemyer said

Halloween isn’t just about haunted houses though, it is also about the candy and the fun you have with friends. Halloween means a lot of different things to different people.  

“For me, Halloween means being different for a day,” sophomore Cadi Xie said. “There is something so unique about it, where everyone can be whatever they want to be. Another part of Halloween that I love are the scary movies, they are thrilling and sometimes a little comical especially if the movie was badly made. I just think that Halloween is a really cool time of year to be goofy and fun,”