STEM Escape: Immersing urban and rural families in a biomedical mystery

Escape rooms are an engaging and increasingly popular game format in which a team is “locked” in a room and challenged to solve a series of narrative-embedded puzzles encoded in the room’s artifacts in order to “escape” within a set period of time. The University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) and partners University of Kansas Natural History Museum (KUNHM) and the California Academy of Science (CAS) developed and evaluated a “serious game” (i.e., a game designed for a purpose other than entertainment) based on the escape room model. Our traveling/loanable pop-up escape room with extension activities engages diverse families in museums and libraries in solving a biomedical mystery. The experience is designed to teach fundamental concepts in biology, engage critical-thinking and collaboration skills, and stimulate interest in biomedical research careers. The project communicates NGSS-aligned content central to medical research – in particular, basic concepts regarding evolutionary relationships/phylogenetics, a topic with a wide variety of medical applications, such as determining the source of emerging infectious diseases, tracking the progression of disease within a host, and developing antivenoms.