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Building an Escape Room

NOTE: This part of the site is still new and receiving lots of updates.

At the Raspberry Pi Clubs Conference in 2024, I was impressed and inspired by the talk by Andy Briggs and Richard Hayler on building an escape room. The escape room concept is perfect for engaging young minds with physical computing as well as letting them be creative with crafts at the same time. The structure of the escape room concept of having multiple small parts each adding to the overall adventure helps neutralises many of the challenges I've encountered with physical computing projects in the past; i.e., they are either too simple or quickly escalate in complexity.

Richard Hayler used scratch with a Raspberry Pi to build his escape room. An example material that can help you get started down that route is the Raspberry Pi Foundations Physical Computing With Scratch project as recommended by Richard.

Andy Briggs escape room was built around BBC micro:bits and MicroPython. You can read more about andy's escape room at the following locations:

Objectives

Before determining how I was going build escape rooms projects, I set out some objectives. My code club contains a range of ages and abilities and I felt it was important that any group project was inclusive for everyone in the group, regardless of where they were in their coding journey. So what were the goals for my escape room materials?

  1. Be fun and creative.
  2. Maximise the range of abilities that can participate in the activity at the same time.
  3. Base the projects around crafting and imagination, using physical computing to enhance the experience.
  4. Minimise the overall cost of participation through using cheap(ish) and reusable items.
  5. Provide a toolkit of ideas that can be used to build escape room style projects.
  6. Provide example projects to demonstrate how to use the toolkit of ideas.

In summary, I want the experience to be fun, as inclusive as possible, using cheap off the shelf components that are easy to integrate with card or paper based crafts so the children can focus on designing and constructing their own adventures. I want examples to show them the types of magic they can perform but ultimately they should be able to build their own adventures.

The MakeCode Platform

I concluded the best platform to use to meet my objectives was the MakeCode platform as it provides great flexibility on the devices that can be used, provides a great blocks experience which expands out to Static TypeScript (JavaScript) and Python as experience allows. It also has excellent support for a small, cheap, readily available device that is packed with sensors and will form the backbone of your escape rooms because of the excellent wireless communications. Yes, I'm talking about the amazing BBC micro:bit (versions 1 and 2).

I've found that the backbone of my escape room projects are based around the BBC micro:bit because it is both cheap and has excellent wireless communication (both versions 1 and 2 are used in my projects). However, I have also had excellent success in using other MakeCode platforms in the projects. For example, I was easily able to get BBC micro:bit to talk to a MakeCode Arcade device over a wire, transmitting data between the two. This is achieved easily because the same underlying platform is used throughout, simply modified to the specific devices strengths. This includes the following MakeCode platforms.

Materials

Building fancy computer puzzles is great fun. It should not be the only thing that the forms the escape room. Indeed, it doesn't even need to be the majority of the escape room. Rather, the MakeCode devices should be used to complement a much more physical experience. After all, an escape room is essentially a series of puzzles that logically follow on from one another. Some of those puzzles can simply require pen, paper and some problem solving. I therefore recommend that you equip yourself with the following materials.

As this is as much a toolkit of ideas that can be used to assemble your own escape room puzzles, it contains a collection of smaller techniques that can be used together.

Examples

The following example projects show how to use the toolkit of ideas to create an escape room style puzzle.

Steal the Nerds

Escape from Alcatron - currently at concept stage

Rescue from Starnet - currently at concept stage

Flight of the Starship - currently at concept stage

Treasure of Pirate Cove - currently at concept stage

Where on Earth is Carole Sanders? - currently at concept stage