Make Your Escape: An Active Learning Approach

This lightning talk describes the use of escape rooms in Computer Science and Mathematics education. Escape rooms are games where players work collaboratively to solve a series of puzzles in order to achieve a goal within a limited time frame. Student created escape room puzzles are a novel way for students to foster and demonstrate their knowledge through non-traditional methods. This activity can be used in courses across the CS curriculum as well as in K-12 education. Students enjoy building the escape rooms, so they don't consider it a formal assessment and it promotes creativity and teamwork skills. Our presentation will cover the key elements in this process from formation of groups to acquiring traditional escape room elements as well as other resources that students use to create the puzzles. We will also discuss how we familiarized the students with escape rooms before the activity. We will give examples of some of the puzzles created by our CS students that included the history of computing, tracing computer code, designing algorithms, solving logic problems, binary numbers, decoding ASCII codes, encryption and sequence and series problems.