Once again at Marineholmen, this time during Passion For Ocean festival on the 3rd of June, bioCEED showed up with 3 cardboard boxes on a table.
People visiting our stand were faced with a challenge to open a series of padlocks, and the solution to open them was to be found inside these boxes, all related to the ocean, and the importance it has for everyone, and everything. The idea behind the escape-room/box concept is to play, have fun, explore and use true information about a topic to figure out the solutions that are “hidden in plain sight”. The participants got to explore the importance of whale poop, the longevity of plastic decomposition in the sea, and different forms of reproduction strategies among different marine animals.
We made the escape-boxes with 3 different difficult levels, encouraging both kids and grownups to play, some tried it alone, some in groups – and we got around 100 people playing during this day! It was so lovely to see how much people enjoy challenging themselves trying to solve the riddles. For some the prize was not the candy inside, but the joy and self-efficacy they got from understanding the riddles and opening the locks. Many asked questions about the thing they saw; “is it true that a single oyster can have 200 million eggs!?”, and many agreed that this was a good way of creating good memories about learning, or mental hooks about certain topics. And all agreed this was a lot of fun!
Wonder about how you can run educational escape boxes on your own? See our toolkit guide on gamification here.