Computer Science Escape Room

Now that my ICS3U students have completed the escape room this year, I can share what we got up to! If you make use of the escape room in class, I’d love to hear about it.

Topics covered: conditional statements, loops, input/output, tiny bit of string indexing

Theme: Retro games

What began as a regular late-night retro gaming session turned sour when all of the characters seemed to disappear from the screen. Suddently all of the characters and items have been ported to different universes and everything is jumbled.

There were 3 phases to the escape room:

Phase 1: Initial problem solving to determine the required letters to crack a code. This included some thinking problems & some coding problems.

Phase 2: A decryption problem using a Caesar Cipher.

Phase 3: A final black screen where the konami code needs to be entered to win.

Phase 1

The website can be found here.

Image shows 6 pacman characters. The first line of three is the orange ghost, teal ghost, and pink ghost. Second line is pacman, red ghost, blue ghost.

In this phase, students were shown 6 different images, which each link to a problem to be solved.

The solution to each problem results in a letter. So in the end, they have 6 letters.

To exit phase 1, they need to fill in a google form with their code

Image shows a series of pacman icons. 2 orange ghosts, 2 teal ghosts, 1 pink ghost, 1 pacman, 1 pink ghost, 1 pacman, 1 blue ghost, 1 red ghost

The site provides an overview of each of the problems. In some cases, students were given scrambled code. In other cases they had a logic problem to sort out.

Around the room there were characters that related to the storyline and they provided the input for the programs.

Problem	Physical clues in the room	Digital Resources	Final Letter
Clyde	Sonic the hedgehog: 4	Scrambled code in jamboard	Z
Inky	Spiderman hanging: 2 Spiderman standing: Fortune And Glory Kid, Fortune And Glory Indiana Jones → table with the following: A 0 E 20 I 40 M 60	Code with tracing table	I
Pinky	N/A	Logic problem.	Q
Pac	N/A	Character images.This one is a big weak because the decoded message is Mario’s Arch_Rival and they are supposed to find Wario and then Wario[0] = WI’d change this in the future but most get it with some light coaching	W
Blinky	N/A	Logic problem	F
Scared Ghost	Deadpool: 3 A bunch of different groups of bananas around the room, each in kind of an arrow shape pointing to a letter 9 bananas: G 6 bananas: P 7 bananas: K 4 bananas: C	Code and a tracing table	G

Final answer for Phase 1: ZZIIQWQWGF

Phase 2

The website can be found here.

Physical clue in the room -> Giant dinosaur with an exercise headband: 5

This phase was comprised of pseudocode for decrypting a string that’s been shifted using a Caesar Cipher.

Final answer for Phase 1: UUDDLRLRBA

The Konami code!

Phase 3

The website can be found here

It may be restricted for some viewers. Contact me at courtney.edwards@ocdsb.ca if you need a copy of the code. This is the video I used to quickly create the program because this was no time to reinvent the wheel.

This is the embed script:

Essentially, it’s a javascript file that displays a black screen. If the user enters the konami code, then they see a blinking excited completion screen.