Page 44 - spaces4learning, Summer 2022

computer gets hacked, our tendency is to turn it off or unplug it or shut it down. That's not what you should do if your computer gets hacked. You keep it open, you leave it as it is and you call your IT department. For the forensic team to do their job, you have to leave it in the state you found it when it was hacked. As a nurse, how would you know that?
CT: It's like all these traditional vocations, they now also need IT training.
Ritter-Guth: Yep. As community college educators, we teach people how to build these things. We teach them how
to sell these things. We teach them how to install them. We're preparing the workforce. So they need to know how to think critically, because the technology will change.
CT: Did you have learning outcomes in mind when designing the room?
Ritter-Guth: We wanted to build the room and then work with faculty to meet their course learning outcomes. The course learning outcomes for Criminal Justice will be different from Nursing 101. So the instructional designers and I work with faculty to meet their instructional goals.
The room itself, we open up to the public so they can come in for free. We have a lot of Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops coming in, and we've done outreach to the schools. The problem was, as soon as we were ready to cut the ribbon and launch the
room — March of 2020. So then the room sat for two years, and because of where it is and the age of the building, we couldn't have more than six people in the room. We're just now getting back to full capacity. And even then, we're being cautious, be- cause you have to touch things for the escape room. Like the smart fridge. You’re thinking, why would anybody hack a smart fridge? A smart fridge has cameras on the inside, which are great if you want to see what your elderly mother might need from the store. But it also has cameras on the outside. So if you want to stalk your neighbor, you can hack those cameras and spy into people's very intimate lives in their kitchen.
CT: You have so many hackable devices in the room. Did you need to work with IT to make sure that those technologies are isolated or can't be used to hack into the campus network? Ritter-Guth: When I envisioned the room, I built into the plan that it would have its own network. Because the goal, going into the pandemic, was to work with schools interna- tionally — so that they can hack our room, and then we have to solve it. The only way to teach hacking is to teach people how to hack, and then how to know that something has been hacked, and then how to fix it. So IT helped us create that room; they were very helpful. At the time, they were very con- cerned that they would not be held accountable if the college got hacked because of that room. But you can hack everything in that room and it will not touch the college.
44 SUMMER 2022 | spaces4learning.com