Page 45 - spaces4learning, Summer 2022

I always say our purpose is to teach “build, break, defend.” You can't learn to defend something if it hasn't been broken. It's just like learning about fire: You don't learn how to put out a grease fire by just talking about it. So it's very much the same principle. We want to give students a space to learn that.
CT: How often do you think you'll need to update the tech- nology in the room?
Ritter-Guth: That's a good question, and actually one that we struggle with, because the room sat
in-person and virtual escape rooms — the best way is to start at the end. Where are you putting the key at the end? In our particular escape room, you have to get into a safe, which is a biometric safe that's tied only to my fingerprint. It has a back- up key, and that's what you have to find. Where are you going to put the key that unlocks the safe? Then how are you going to find where that key is? So you start backwards, and then you build your puzzles to the front side.
The first thing we do is show you a welcome video that talks about the room and says there's nothing
for two years, and refrigerators have
gotten better. The one we have is a
great fridge — it was $4,000 when we
bought it. That fridge is now $2,000
and better fridges have come out. How
often do you refresh a room like that?
So, I don't know the best answer to
that question, other than to say that we'll look at the technol- ogy again at the end of this coming year. We constantly have to be on top of it, to make sure that the technology is still relevant. And you have to upgrade the apps all the time too.
CT: Could you talk about how you create an escape room puzzle?
Ritter-Guth: I actually got certified to make escape rooms, so I went to training. But the easiest way — I do both
on the ceiling, nothing behind the paint- ings, nothing underneath the furniture, underneath the couches. You have 30 minutes to work on the puzzles. We kind of lock you in there and then we're ac- tually watching you on one of the many cameras — usually on the phone camera.
And we do give hints. Professional escape rooms, they want more money from you — it's to their advantage for you not to solve it, so you have to pay the 20 bucks again and keep going back until you solve it. It's not in our advantage to not have successful stu- dents. So we give them hints, we give them time.
CT: Do you ever have students design their own escape experi- ences?
Ritter-Guth: That is always my goal — to have the students
I ALWAYS SAY OUR PURPOSE IS TO TEACH “BUILD, BREAK, DEFEND.”
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