David Gillette, Michael Haungs, Lee McGowan
California Polytechnic State University
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Throughout the 2015-2016 academic year, students in the Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies program at Cal Poly designed, built and tested a series of escape rooms, finally resolving on a central story and final set of puzzles. Escape rooms are interactive play spaces where participants are locked into a room and must solve puzzles inside the room in order to escape in a given time frame. The LAES program was interested in creating the world’s first internationally-connected escape room experience connecting two escape rooms on different sides of the globe. The clues to solve the puzzles in the USA were hidden in a room in Australia, and visa versa. The rooms were connected by Skype, allowing participants to communicate and successfully escape. The puzzles were based on linguistics, astronomy, physics, pop culture, and mathematics.
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The primary goal of the project was to mimic the hybrid connections the LAES program makes between engineering and liberal arts problem solving methods, with a game-centered collaboration that encouraged participants to develop similar hybrid problem solving skills in a constrained time period. Assessment became a central concern of the project, as we needed to develop a method for assessing the student work and learning, while also developing a method to track the learning and collaborative activities of the room participants. This presentation will discuss this hybrid development and teaching process, and the failures and successes of the different forms of assessment used throughout the year when tracking this project.