Tabletop Escape Room Activities for Engaging Outreach in Engineering—A Preliminary Approach

Student outreach activities are conducted by many engineering faculties to provide a positive experience of engineering for as many potential future students as possible. In this article, we present the activities we designed for our university open days, leveraging a tabletop version of an immensely popular game concept called escape rooms. We describe our design of three puzzles to be completed in under half an hour, based on gears, circuits and ciphers, and programmed their solutions into our physical hardware decoder box. A relatively small sample of open day attendees, mostly prospective university students, played our escape room puzzles. Participants were then invited to fill in a short questionnaire, results revealing encouraging levels of engagement with these activities.