11-02-2026
“We don’t like group projects,” students tell faculty all the time.
“Actually, you do like working with other people, and it can be fun,” Natalie Schneider, clinical assistant professor of organizational behavior, proves to them with her organizational behavior classroom exercise, “Saving Stitch: An Escape Room Challenge for Introducing Teams and Leadership.”
The game places teams of students in a timed challenge to free Stitch, the mischievous Disney character — though it can work with any beloved character, which Schneider notes in her recently published paper. Along the way, students solve clues tied to communication, team roles and leadership behaviors. They also discover under real-time stress what happens when a team must make decisions, divide work, manage anxiety and get everyone involved.
Schneider positions the exercise about two-thirds of the way through the 16-week semester, just as teams are assigned for the course’s final project. Students choose their groups the week before but have not yet worked together on a high-stakes graded assignment.
The escape room becomes their first shared experience before they begin the project — a group podcast project that applies organizational behavior concepts to a case study.
The escape room shows how “they can learn how to work together in a low-stakes environment,” Schneider says.
A 20-minute time limit brings individual strengths and group behavior patterns to the surface quickly. Students learn who gravitates toward quantitative work, who pieces together complicated problems, who finds hidden clues and who organizes the group’s next steps. That gives them a useful early picture of how they can contribute to the larger project.
“By then, their next step is to write their first draft of their podcast project script,” she says. “So they already have an idea of who will be strongest at doing analytical work in the case study. Who’s strongest at the writing piece of it?”
With only 20 minutes to jailbreak Stitch, the pressure is real. It can create frustration and heightened emotions. But when a team finally succeeds, “you can see the physical excitement and relief that they have that, ‘Oh my gosh, we figured this really, really hard thing out on our first day working together,’” Schneider says.
Not just a team-building exercise, this is pedagogy at its strongest — playful but with each element linked to the concepts. Schneider designs each clue to connect to theories learned in class.
For example, one clue asks students to work through the process model of communication. They must identify concepts such as sender, receiver, message, encoding, decoding and noise. But as they solve the clue, they are also living the model: sharing information, trying to make it understandable to teammates and navigating distractions, misunderstandings and the noise of a competitive classroom.
“In that process, they are actively being speakers who are taking in information into a message, diluting that message into something that can be understandable, not just for them, but for their classmates, and literally enacting it.”
The activity likewise makes team roles visible. Students may emerge as task-focused contributors, relationship builders or, occasionally, individuals whose behavior slows the group down. The subsequent debrief invites students to recognize these roles without publicly singling out teammates for negative behavior.
When a student organizes the work, delegates tasks or checks the group’s progress, leadership theory comes alive. A student who encourages participation, recognizes a teammate’s contribution or represents the group to the instructor is showing relationship-oriented leadership.
“There’s almost this meta feeling they get afterwards when we’re debriefing,” Schneider says. “They realize ‘Oh, actually, we just lived it out. We don’t necessarily have to just define it. We can actually experience it.’”
Schneider presented the exercise at the Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society’s 2025 conference, where fellow educators participated as students would. Their feedback sharpened the exercise. Management educators, she says with a laugh, “are good at breaking the rules.” One group struggling with a clue used their own personal effects to solve a clue — because Schneider had not specifically prohibited it.
“They’re really fantastic at finding the loopholes or the spaces that you didn’t realize connected in ways you didn’t intend,” she says. The result was stronger, clearer game rules — and productive discussion about ethics, originality and the consequences of one team taking another’s ideas.
Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society (MOBTS) colleagues also helped her improve the connection between game mechanics and learning objectives. A former instruction that told students to visit the instructor for the next clue evolved into: “Go tell the instructor the three ways your group has been a leader in this exercise in order to earn your next clue.”
The published activity includes materials and guidance that make adaptation possible across business disciplines. Schneider has already heard from educators considering the structure for content introductions and exam reviews.
“The format that I created works for any discipline,” she says. The key is preserving the connection between the content key for team members to know and what they physically do during the game. In accounting, for example, that might mean making an accounting spreadsheet part of the clue and part of the application.
She is now adapting the model for executive education through Purdue’s Office of Business Partnerships and Course Production in Teaching and Learning Technologies within Purdue University Online. The project will use an escape-room format to engage practicing senior managers with talent management, executive presence and leadership techniques.
“We’re going to have people who are top-level managers in practice doing an escape room method,” Schneider says.
And why Stitch?
“It's my favorite movie,” Schneider says. “It’s a movie a lot of students have seen. And when I bring up the characters, everybody knows what I’m talking about.” When she explains the task, she says, ”I don’t think there’s a single student whose face is not in a smile.”
