W.S.G. Isaac Newton

Escape Experience Aeroseum

Development of an educational escape room

An educational escape room about mechanics has been designed at the Aeroseum in Gothenburg, an experience-based activity center that allows visitors to discover the history and development of aviation in its interactive exhibitions and aims to stimulate young people’s interest in science and technology through its educational program for schools.

The designed escape room activity starts with an introduction to the storyline: a pilot has gone on a mission and will return within a specified period. The participants will have to find the location where the pilot has to land and send it to the pilot in time. To this end, they first solve two puzzles within the escape room – a cave aligning the tunnels in the underground hangar that houses the Aeroseum – to unlock the next stage. They are then challenged to solve ten puzzles for which the clues are hidden throughout the Aeroseum and that require both teamwork and creativity to solve. During this stage, they gradually find the components with which they can complete the interactive physics puzzles – about gear systems, pendulums, motion diagrams, friction, pulley systems, and equilibrium of moments. The solved physics puzzles provide them with four sets of coordinates and a frequency at which they can communicate with the pilot. In the final stage, the four sets of coordinates are combined to find the required location, which is then sent to the pilot through an Arduino system.

The development process of the educational escape room consisted of three phases: during the orientation phase the possibilities and limitations were explored; in the detailed design phase the puzzles were created and the room was decorated; and during the implementation phase the escape room was prepared for actual use.