Mantle Off Track but Terribly Fun

I have a whole bunch of photos so I'm going to have to sift through and locate the most relevant ones to tell the story!
Mantle has kind of morphed into a huge problem solving almost escape room type thing which the children are loving and I'm having heaps of fun putting together.
My initial plan has gone way off track but that's ok because the learning that's happening is amazing, everyone is fully engaged, and the other curriculum areas are being implemented as well.
While trying to figure out how I could bring in a few pre planned "tensions" I had a moment that went like this...
I was intending to give the "company" a cloze reading activity using a newspaper article about sneakers made from ocean plastic, but it just didn't fit with who they (the company) are, why on earth would they be doing cloze reading activities? The phone went ring ring (that was me saying "ring ring, ring ring") I picked up the phone (which is just two pieces of pvc pipe stuck together) and had a conversation with ... Great Aunt Myrtle! I made it up as I went along and the children were all so excited, like it was real, and Great Aunt Myrtle has evolved into a crazy but helpful old dear who has a liking for puzzles and mysteries.
It turned out she had spilt her cup of tea on the article, so the company had to figure out the words from a code and put them in the right places. The clues started off simple enough, but whenever anyone looked like they were almost there, I found I could draw it out a little further by adding in extra problems to solve along the way. The class loved it so much, they wanted to do more of the same the next day. So I invented Polly Ethylene, the evil, devious owner of a plastic bag manufacturing factory. We had to hack her "acebook" account and shut her down as she had a large group of followers who were opposed to not having the option of plastic shopping bags at the supermarket (for various ridiculous reasons, some of them real) but it turns out she also has an evil plot to do more environmental damage, and unethical plans for the future, so our company have been working through a whole bunch of clues and riddles to discover the evidence that will lead to her arrest.  The clues have involved so much awesome maths and literacy, and the children are so into it! They managed to find the box with the plan, which had a combination lock on it. They succeeded in opening the lock, only to find the evidence in a jar with another lock! The evidence once they crack that lock is in code too, and the clue for the code was in the box but they can't figure out what that clue is for... yet! It's been so much fun, and they've discovered morse code, braille, binary and semaphore, worked with fractions, time and measurement problems, grids and coordinates, place value, plus had to solve lots of riddles. And I'm having so much fun watching them problem solve and work together!
It's funny, Murgatroyd, the original pretend person we were dealing with who started us off with our first commission, has kind of faded into oblivion. I had to send a pretend email from him to the company the other day just to remind them of his existence and that he does actually have expectations that we have agreed to meet! But there is nothing like an evil villain to make things more exciting!

The first code, the one that started it all!

Fake email... printed paper stuck over the computer screen!

Binary code giving them instructions as to where they might find the next clue

This was from a really cool app I found. It took them a while to solve, another photo further below you can see properly...

And once they had gathered all three digits, it was only a matter of time before they got the right combination

Everyone wanted to have a go!

Oh no, another combination lock!

Turn it and look at it on an angle, it says look under the chair. There were sticky notes under chairs, only one gave the actual clue though.

This riddle took quite some time to figure out and resulted in every book being removed from the bookshelf. Great Aunt Myrtle had to call and give a little hint.

The novel we are currently reading as a class, Holes.

Yes, I actually lined up the text and cut out all the little windows