Intro: Escape the Test (video)
An escape room, also known as an escape game, is a game in which a team of players cooperatively discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to progress and accomplish a specific goal in a limited amount of time.
In this project you are going to ask the students to design an educational escape room. Because of the request to align engineering with physics we are recommending that the students design their game around physics topics, but ultimately you should decide what the objective is based on your educational goals. Because of the open-ended nature of this project the content is not limited to any specific area unless you provide constraints centered around your learning objectives, and perhaps those of the physics instructor if you should choose to work collaboratively.
This project is an open project to allow maximum flexibility for creativity. As a result the learning goals are not as concrete as for some other projects. The only constraint that we're giving the students is the topic, physics education. If the groups are allowed to choose their topic within the world of physics then the physics standards addressed could vary. And accordingly, the ideas that they generate to implement their ideas into the real, physical space could mean that any variety of engineering standards are being met.
As always, there is opportunity for you to drive the instruction in any direction that you choose if you should decide to impose additional constraints on the design objectives. If the students are responsible for maintaining a personal portfolio that tracks how they have met and mastered relevant standards this might also act as an opportunity for them to choose their own constraints to help them fill voids within those portfolios.
We are asking the students to create some a physical, interactive escape room that requires operating in several domains (physics, engineering, education, etc.) simultaneously.
Collaboration is the key to creating a successful escape room in a reasonable time period and this project will require both small group and whole class collaboration. It is recommended that the class be broken into smaller student groups. Perhaps each group is responsible for developing and constructing at least one puzzle for the escape room. But all of the puzzles have to work together so the entire class will have to work together to determine how all of their components and puzzles will work together to create a cohesive and interesting education escape room.
Stanford d-school resources
How to Design an Education Escape Room (website)
Education escape room toolkit (document)
Collaboration Resources (document)