Team:UNSW Australia/Education/Escape Room

OVERVIEW

This project was initially chosen to increase the amount of people we could expose our project to as well as exposure to the issue of coral bleaching that is occurring on our coast as of now. Online Escape Rooms have shown tremendous success in terms of reach out to university students, especially here at UNSW. Furthermore, due to the conditions of social distancing and need for social interactions with friends, we have seen more success with these kinds of escape rooms especially now. This event was made in mind for a ‘collaborative interaction’ inducing a more engaging experience amongst teammates. (1) Escape rooms have a lot of potential for creativity as we could create and adapt the story and visuals to whatever format we choose. This idea and execution came from a member of the UNSW Puzzle Society with expertise in creating these kinds of events who had seen recent immense success with another faculty reaching over 250 university students, leading to being one of the biggest online events of the year. We hoped to achieve a similar success in reach as well to experience the journey that the UNSW iGEM team had gone on throughout the year.

INTENTIONS

As aforementioned, we planned on targeting university students. These materials are to be used in a very recreational way with small facts about the issue we were targeting as well as parallels to the solution we have intended. The story that was made along with the puzzles was understandable by students of all disciplines with low reliance of scientific knowledge. This was enforced by welcoming visuals that were carefully made to provide an immersive experience for those who wanted to participate in the escape room. Those with interest in this kind of content were able to understand the basic science of our solution with relation to preventing coral bleaching as well as stay immersed in the puzzles and stories!

Examples of the Coral Conundrum puzzles and their visuals

To ensure we reached a larger audience, we collaborated with a faculty society to reach out to further audiences. Moreover, we created a competitive event with a cash prize to encourage further participation. The event was heavily promoted by the UNSW Puzzle Society and the UNSW BABSOC. The UNSW Puzzle Society members would be people outside of the synthetic biology scope who were interested in participating. The UNSW BABSOC brought members who either had a basic or strong knowledge of synthetic biology and the works of our project. We even showed it off with some sneak peek visuals at our previous symposium event with the international teams. Hence, we reached a large and diverse audience of over 50 people participating in the event and many more who chose to try it out afterwards as it is still available offline through this package!

In addition, we have a potential collaboration with the Student Science Squad and University of Melbourne iGEM team to create a synthetic biology themed event in which we would be able to incorporate this game with it. We also have shared our game with The Future Project at Kings School to be played together within the school’s faculty. The current packaged version of the escape room has been enhanced and adjusted based on feedback from the event, as seen in the images below, to allow all users to experience it in their own preferred way.

Microsoft Teams used as a medium for the escape room competition

EVALUATION FOR THE FUTURE

If this was to be done again, we would recommend doing a recreational activity akin to this. Welcoming aesthetics and heavy promotion to relevant demographics provide a strong opportunity for people to be encouraged to join and, hence, be exposed to the science you want to share. Content and activities should be creative and engaging for the target demographic to ensure that dialogue is initiated.

Experience our Virtual Escape Room: Coral Conundrum here!

Reference

  1. Andrews JJ, Kerr D, Mislevy RJ, von Davier A, Hao J, Liu L. Modeling collaborative interaction patterns in a simulation‐based task. Journal of Educational Measurement. 2017 Feb;54(1):54-69.