Building Digital Skills with a Smart Escape Room
At Pennsylvania’s Northampton Community College, students are engaging with cutting-edge technologies in a basement “apartment” that doubles as an escape puzzle.
Photo courtesy of Northampton Community College
Imagine a cozy apartment filled with the latest in modern conveniences: a smart refrigerator that can show you what groceries you have on hand, a smart bed the measures the quality of your sleep, a voice-enabled assistant that can respond to your every request. Those technologies and more make up the Smart Apartment Learning Lab at Northampton Community College, a combination escape room and technology sandbox in which students can learn about the tech we take for granted in our everyday lives. The lab's first lesson: realizing that the walls literally have eyes — or rather cameras and other sensors, integrated into seemingly innocuous objects.
We spoke with Beth Ritter-Guth, associate dean of online learning and educational technology at the college, to find out how the Learning Lab is engaging students, building digital literacy and providing valuable training in the job skills of the future. The following conversation features highlights from the Campus Technology Insider podcast, and has been edited for length and clarity.
Campus Technology: Could you describe what the Smart
Apartment Learning Lab is and what it's all about?
Beth Ritter-Guth: When I started at Northampton in
2019, I had come from a community college in New Jersey
where I had an innovation space. And I had always wanted to
take innovative pieces and make an apartment, a living space,
where students and the community could think about technology
in the spaces where they live. So, it started with finding a
space: We found a great space at the Fowler Family Center at
Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
in the basement of an old Bethlehem Steel building.
And so we built the Smart
Apartment. The most expensive
thing we have in the room is a
smart refrigerator. And it goes
down to the least expensive thing,
we have a nanny cam in our picture frame. We built an escape
room in this Smart Apartment, and the first question we ask,
which I won't tell you the answer to, is, "How many cameras
and how many mics are in this room?" And I will give you a
hint: It's more than 10, less than 100. But in this small room,
how many things are watching you, how many things are listening
to you? And that unlocks the first clue. People are surprised
by all the different things that have cameras, and how you really
can put a camera in anything now.
CT: I was going to ask how many smart technologies are in
there, but I think that might spoil the escape room.
Ritter-Guth: Well, I'll give you a list of some of the things
we have. The whole room is powered by Alexa. So, we have
a microwave that partners with Alexa; we have a clock that
partners with Alexa; the TVs partner with Alexa. The deadliest
thing in the room is a diffuser that I bought for $19.99 on
Amazon. You're thinking, how's that deadliest thing in that
room? Well, here's how. All of the devices have some kind of
app that runs them. And so you use your phone app, and you have it start up the diffuser and it makes
the apartment smell like roses. But you
could also create a chemical, put it in
the diffuser, leave, launch it and kill
everything in the room. And if you're
somebody looking at a crime scene, if
you want to be a crime scene investigator,
or you're going into the police
academy, how would you even know to
look for that?
If you think about healthcare, and you
think about preparing nurses — which
community colleges often do — if you're
a nurse in a drug treatment facility, now
we have smart toilets that can analyze
everything. As a nurse, how would you
know if that were hacked? We have smart
beds to make sure people are rolling
around and things like that. How would
you know if that were hacked? And what
would you do if it were hacked? If our 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, because
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.
Photo courtesy of Northampton Community College
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 internationally
— 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 concerned
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.
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 technology
in the room?
Ritter-Guth: That's a good question, and actually one that
we struggle with, because the room sat
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 technology
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
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 backup
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
on the ceiling, nothing behind the paintings,
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 actually
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 students.
So we give them hints, we give them time.
CT: Do you ever have students design their own escape experiences?
Ritter-Guth: That is always my goal — to have the students making them. The more that we can put in the hands of
students, the better the experience is, because they are going to
come up with infinitely better connections to the world in which
they live. So that is one of my goals, hopefully for next year, to
get a group of students to come in and build their own escape
room. A good way to do that at the college level is to work
through clubs. I want to partner with our Student Government
Association, to have them maybe build a Halloween escape
room, and then use it as a fundraiser. We’ll be there with them
to help with the technology, but they get to make it and staff it
and do what students do best, which is hang out and have fun.
And they all get to see the technology in a non-threatening way.
CT: Do you have any advice for anyone who would want to
recreate this concept on their own campus?
Ritter-Guth: Think big and bold and brave, always. I
always have at the front of my mind, what are students going
to need to know 20 years from now? We don't know what's
coming 20 years from now, but we do know that the skills
that students need are adaptability, thinking creatively and
really being resilient to change because things change so rapidly
in their world.
We're giving students opportunities to put hands on technology
that they may not be able to afford. Our students can't afford a
$4,000 fridge, so we have the opportunity to give all of these students
access to that kind of technology, which is low-risk to them,
but high-yield in skills. Elon Musk is going to need employees
who know how to do this stuff. Virgin Galactic, they're going to
need employees who know how to build, break and defend the
things that go on these ships that take people out to outer space.
And so, I'm so thankful that Northampton has allowed me to be
a visionary. Not a lot of schools can afford to do that. I've been
very thankful that Northampton has supported me.
Be bold and brave. People are going to think that you're
nuts, and they're not always going to value your vision. But if
you're ethical, and you follow your heart, and you keep your
student learning outcomes in mind all of the time, don't worry
about that other stuff. Don't be afraid to be different.