ANU Computing vs. The Escape Room
One room, 60 minutes, five puzzles and the only way out is to solve them. That’s the challenge facing students at the ANU School of Computing.
Tapping into a global trend of escape rooms — where participants are locked in a room and must solve puzzles in order to get out — the innovative teaching exercise is the creation of Senior Lecturer Dr Bernardo Pereira Nunes and aims to teach computational thinking, problem-solving and collaboration, while having a bit of fun.
Students are given an hour to solve five computer science puzzles in a room filled with cobwebs, hidden tools and props that double as clues.
“I had this idea a couple of years ago,” Pereira Nunes said. “I had experienced an escape room and I started thinking how could I do this for my students?”
The design of the neon-lit room, as well as the riddles, clues and accompanying software, were developed by Pereira Nunes’ tutors and former students, who admit they are a little jealous of his current cohort.
Students enrolled in the Software Design Methodologies course were invited to organise themselves into teams and choose a time slot to try their luck. Each of the puzzles addresses different topics taught in the course, including software testing, design patterns and unified modeling language (UML).
MORE: https://cecs.anu.edu.au/escape-room