Innovation & Creativity Lab - Gettysburg College

The Setting:

A mad scientist has locked you inside of his lab!

• You must escape the lab in under 1 hour
• One of your companions has been sent 50 years into the past (Virtual Reality)

The Restrictions:

In order to test the participants’ ability to communicate and draw their attention to how poor communication can impact their ability to work together and solve a problem, some participants of the escape room are randomly assigned a “restriction”. These restrictions include only communicating through texts or hand written messages, only speaking in a whisper, and a boss/intern scenario, in which the boss chooses and intern and may only communicate with the rest of the group through the intern. After the participants escape or run out of time, they participate in a debrief, where each person can talk about how their restriction impacted the experience.

The Machines:

• HTC Vive
• CNC Machine
• 3D Printer
• Laser Cutter

The VR Experience:

Motives:

The HUB space on campus is underutilized, and it’s been decided that putting an Innovation and Creativity Lab in as part of the space will help to draw people to the West Building. Our client, Rod Tosten, wanted us to design “a teambuilding activity that incorporates VR” to add to this space. As part of the escape room, we hoped to teach participants the basics of using the different machines, push people to think about how they communicate and how communication impacts the ability to work as a team, and provide a fun experience for the participants.

Expert Research:

We had the unique opportunity to work with a consultant, Sam Strom. Sam is a team-building expert and we spoke with her periodically throughout the semester to assure that the escape room really does foster team-building. Sam also had previously done some research that she shared with us and this research impacted decisions made about the machines and the Innovation and Creativity Lab. 

Why an Escape Room?:

The idea of an escape room came up very early in our planning process and stuck almost immediately. The idea resonated with everyone, as it is a trendy and fun activity that, by its nature, necessarily incorporates team-building. Building an escape room allowed for a lot of flexibility and creativity in designing our project, something we all enjoyed.

The Challenges:

This project, while fun, was not without its challenges. There were several hurdles the group had to overcome to create a successful escape room.

• Learning to use the machines – All 4 machines were new to us. We had to learn how to operate the physical machinery, as well as how to write the needed code and design appropriate objects for the machines to make or display.
• Accessibility of the machines – For much of the semester, the machines lived in Rod’s office and to access them, we had to schedule meetings with Rod. Eventually, the machines were moved down to the HUB where they must be kept in locked closets. To access them, we had to work during the hours that people were available to unlock the closets, or call DPS to open the closets for us.
• Continued purchase of materials – Shortly after we came up with the scenario for the escape room, we purchased our initial round of supplies for the room. However, we ran into issues with not having the correct materials for the CNC machine and had to go back and purchase new materials.
• Machine malfunctions – The computer in the laser cutter broke in mid-November and was sent to be repaired. As we reach the end of the semester, it still has not been fixed and we do not have a functioning laser cutter. As the machine is necessary to escape the room, we had to create a paper work-around to allow people to escape the room.
• Creating restrictions – As part of the escape room, the participants’ ability to communicate with each other is restricted. This pushes them to think about how poor communication can impact the ability to complete a task. However, coming up with restrictions that make sense and do not prevent the room from being fun to complete has been quite difficult.
• HUB space continues to change – The process of transitioning the HUB to the Innovation and Creativity Lab has meant that we did not have a designated space to set up the escape room. The space will continue to change even after we have finished our project. This has made setting up the room and conveying to participants what they should and shouldn’t interact with very difficult. One of the most common complaints we got during user testing was that participants were unsure where the boundaries of the room were and what could be a clue and what was actually just part of the HUB.

Future Work:

• One difficulty this semester was the unreliability of the laser cutter. In the future, getting the laser cutter fixed and back into the game is a very high priority.
• As the Hub space continues to change, clues and game components will likely have to be modified and moved around until everything settles into its final home.
• Ideally, we would like to get one central computer to connect to the CNC machine, the laser cutter, and the 3D printer so the game master does not have to bring their laptop to use with the machines.
• Once the laser cutter is added back into the game, the difficulty will likely change and clues will have to be modified to make escaping in 1 hour possible.

Acknowledgements:

• Project Advisor & Client: Dr. Rodney Tosten
• Project Advisor & VR Consultant: Dr. Clifton Presser
• Team Building Consultant: Samantha Strom
• Gettysburg College IT Department
• Gettysburg College Computer Science Departmant