The Escape Room (10 team)

Description

Learning Objectives: ■ to test how well teams perform when working under pressure ■ to test teams’ understanding of a complex task ■ to practice organizational and time-management skills ■ to highlight the value of teams interacting and sharing data with other teams (in cooperation, not rivalry) ■ to test teams’ approach to problem-solving (lateral thinking) ■ to test communication skills More about the activity: In this fun and challenging activity, teams are locked in a room (in theory!). The doors are chained shut and there are just 60 minutes to escape! To escape teams must discover the vital lock combination to release the door. But first, they must construct a tower to get reception to call for help should they fail to escape by the deadline! (In the virtual version, instead of building a tower, teams have to solve a spatial problem - The Courtyard Problem.) The lock combination is made up of several digits. Each team must find ONE of those digits so that when put together in the right order they unlock the chains. Teams find the crucial digits by solving eight problems. But- they are not all straightforward. It’s very easy to go wrong if you are not organized and paying full attention to every aspect. To ensure they solve the problems correctly teams must work with each other rather than competing. Wrong answers incur time penalties. It’s a race against time - but more haste often means less speed! A correct solution to a problem earns teams a letter of the alphabet (although only the FIRST team with the right answer gets the letter). There are eight letters available which, when put in order together with other letters teams possess at the start, spell out who locked them in the room. So the teams’ objectives are: find the combination, discover who locked them in, and build a tower that meets certain criteria!