Engaging undergrads remotely with an escape room game

While some lab-related activities, such as calculations and data analysis, can be done remotely, these can feel like extra work. Faced with the cancellation of their own in-person laboratory classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, Matthew J. Vergne and colleagues looked outside-the-box. They sought to develop an online game for their students that would mimic the cooperative learning that normally accompanies a lab experience. To do so, they designed a virtual escape game with an abandoned chocolate factory theme. Using a survey-creation app, they set up a series of "rooms," each containing a problem that required students to, for example, calculate the weight of theobromine, a component of chocolate.