Sherry Yan

Built an escape room experience designed to analyze and elevate collaboration between players.

Stanford d.school  

Instructor: Louie Montoya

Cannon Kissane, Natalie Bai, Charlotte, Tracy

Fall 2023 (3 weeks) 

Sketching, Supplies at the d.school

Create an interactive escape room adventure centered around collaborative problem-solving. The experience should feature puzzles carefully crafted to necessitate teamwork, with each challenge requiring collective effort in order to progress deeper into the room, and eventually solve it. The entire experience should follow these guidelines:

01. Experience up to 4 naive players.

02. Experience limited to 15 minutes to solve.

03. Three - Four puzzles that require collaboration, and a theme/narrative.

How might we measure crucial student competencies--such as collaborative problem-solving--in engaging and relevant ways that provide immediate feedback for improvement?

Upon entering Professor Reef's office to return the pile of textbooks you burrowed for your research paper on the Ancient Underwater City of Atlantis, you and your friends are met up a major upheaval of his room. Papers are scattered everywhere and furniture is overturned and broken; forgetting about your paper, you go in to investigate. A file on what remains of the desk catches your attention... Looks like Reef made a breakthrough on the location of Atlantis and has its sacred Trident in his possession, but it also seems that there are agents or entities outside who disliked this. Yet, it also seems that he foresaw this because he left little clues, a locked box, and a message:

"Student, if your reading this, it means they already got me. But i'm not important. Hurry, I've hidden clues around the building, including the trident. I've split that thing apart. Find its 3 jewels. Find everything. If not, the world will end. Start with the box. Go. Good Luck.

Experience held in d.school Bay Lab

Nothing is in plain sight; Prof. Reef needed to hide things well, but he trusts that your team is smart enough to find everything.

Player work together to find the following:

key for the box, the three wheels of the Code Wheel, a paper with a scribbled code.

The Code Wheel will help the team decode the message. It takes a team effort to figure all the moving pieces --after all, Prof. Reef needed to be secure. There are three levels of decoding. 

The reward upon completion allows you to access everything in the box.

The box contains little fish cards with N, S, W, E  sequences written in the back. Each card is color coded. A blacklight pen suggests there is a secret message. A transparent grid fits perfectly on the map. 

Players works together to plot the correct points on the map, according to the clues.

The map is mounted on the wall, impossible to take down and lay flat on a table.

Players work together to hold up the grid to the map to see the location each point corresponds to. 

Players split to find all four of the pieces of the trident scattered around the building