I hope this kind of question is welcome here.
A festival of science will take place in a few months in my university, and I would like to set up a simple but exciting escape room for people to discover scientific notions in a fun way.
Ideas on puzzles?
The main theme would be the light; do you know manual puzzles which are simple to setup and would fit (loosely) in this subject? Ideally the puzzles should be solved using some basic knowledge about the physics of light.
The puzzles should be safe for children, repeatable many times, understandable by the general public (after scientific explanation if necessary). Note that I have some budget to build some sort of large cubicle, or even decorate a whole room.
Some well-known tools for puzzles related to light:
- UV flashlight to reveal hidden messages
- (safe) laser pointers
- objects' shadows
Ideas on the scenario?
EDIT: let me add that I am also very bad at finding a scenario that would:
- make sense of the need for the group to escape
- make sense of the limited time
- make sense of the puzzles sitting around, waiting for a solution
... so any ideas on crafting a scenario around the puzzles would be great.
Technical issues
What size should the escape room take? I am worried about a room too small for having sufficient space for the people and the puzzles.
What time should it take and for how many people? Ten minutes would be the maximum time in order to allow many groups to try the escape room. But is this enough to solve puzzles?
Do you have experience in this kind of event? I welcome any general suggestions (organization, budget, technical problems).
Answer
I have no experience making escape rooms, so I can't help too much with the logistics or know if these ideas are practical.
Here are some puzzle ideas:
Use the science of color perception to hide a message in plain sight. Have a picture featuring lots of colored dots in a seemingly nonsense pattern. People to find a magenta gel, and when they put it over the light source, a code is revealed. The idea is that under a magenta light, the color pairs green/black, cyan/blue, yellow/red, and white/magenta become indistinguishable. If you're careful, you can have three distinct codes revealed using magenta, cyan and yellow filters, which would be cool if you had three combination locks whose colors corresponded to the filter you needed to see its code.
A laser maze, where they have to rotate mirrors to get a laser to shine on a certain place. Having a cheap fog machine nearby would reveal the full path of the laser, and be much more fun. Solving the maze causes the light to shine on a particular place on a wall, perhaps a wall with many lock combinations where only the one which is pointed at is correct.
Using refraction: a laser is shining through a glass club, barely missing a mirror. Filling the cup with water causes the beam to bend, so the laser hits a mirror and points out an interesting message.
Using polarized light: Make a grid of squares, where each square is a piece of polarizing film. Some of the squares are turned 90 degrees relative to the others, spelling out a message. This message is invisible under plain light, but when looked at through polarized sunglasses (which you can make yourself by attaching two pieces of the polarized film to empty frames), the rotated squares will appear black while the unrotated ones are still transparent. I got the idea from this how-to page.
None of these puzzles are that hard from a puzzling point of view, so they should be able to be done in 10 min time, especially if you have someone offer hints at the 5 min mark. Their main point is how they have surprising reveals and only work because of the science of light.
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