Harvard students created a sustainability themed escape room as part of Harvard Heat Week, which ran from April 22-24. This aimed to draw attention to the severity of climate change and ran 14 a day over a 3-day span.

Players were presented with puzzles to solve to stop sea level rising and had 25 minutes before floodwaters swept them away.

A monitor displayed the time remaining and projection maps showed how much of Cambridge had flooded in the elapsed time.

“We thought this would be a really cool way to get people to directly engage with some of those (environmental and sustainability) issues”

“Because the mission of the (resource efficiency program) is to encourage sustainable lifestyle shifts all the tasks are centred around changes that students could make, specifically in a dorm-room-type set-up on campus” - Meaghan Townsend

There are currently more than 2000 escape rooms in the US. The Harvard students used this popularity and created a series of puzzles embedded with sustainability lessons on topics such as recycling, waste management, fridge defrosting and phantom energy waste.

For more information visit: https://news.harvard.edu/gazet...