Escapades from a world in chaos
TEACHING CHEMISTRY VIA CREATIVE AND PLAYFUL LESSONS
AS a group of Form Four science students at SMK Dato’ Jaafar (SMKDJ), Johor Baru entered Room D, they saw a box with the instruction: “Flip to page 12 for more instructions.”
Flipping to page 12 of the manual they had uncovered, they then found the statement: “Complete the puzzle, shine on it and escape the room.” Little did they know at that point in time that they had to shine a light on the completed puzzle to obtain a number code written in invisible ink to unlock the door and escape from the room!
This is a scenario from one of the Escape Room sessions set up by the University of Southampton Malaysia Faculty of Engineering and the Environment Assistant Professor Dr Ng Jo-Han together with seven of his students, in collaboration with SMKDJ chemistry teacher Isabelle Wong Minh Chjiat. The sessions are part of a pilot programme for Malaysian secondary school students involving the creative and playful learning (CPL) method for chemistry education.
Here, the medium for the learning method is through the use of a green technologythemed Escape Room. “The green technology theme will be incorporated into the Malaysian science education syllabus next year,” said Ng.
“The Escape Room is also used to introduce subchapters in chemistry education, providing pre-exposure and helping to increase students’ intrinsic motivation levels.
“On top of fostering students’ interest to learn chemistry, CPL helps to enhance soft skills such as leadership, communication and collaboration.”
Ng explained that as the experiments and puzzles come in a range of difficulty levels starting from easy and slowly escalating to medium and difficult modes, the Escape Room can hone problemsolving skills too.
Wong said that through the fun experiments that participants have to complete in the Escape Room, they are able to reinforce lessons learnt on biodiesel, seawater and electricity, and bioplastics.
The students are assigned roles, according to a game story, before entering the Escape Room. “We inform them that the world is descending into chaos due to severe
global pollution. They are a group of elite researchers who desperately want to help save the world. The cure to the end of the world is placed inside this abandoned lab, and they are all making their best attempts to obtain the cure. Time is ticking fast so they need to quicken their pace.”
The students are then given one hour to escape from the locked rooms. Through CCTV cameras set up at various locations in the Escape Rooms, the students’ actions and reactions are observed and noted down. In case they are unable to proceed, the students get hints upon request.
Wong explained that the students have to go through three stages to escape from the locked rooms. The first requires them to familiarise themselves with the Escape Room layout/game.
SMKDJ Form Four student Kwok Wei Yan said: “We first have to unlock a box containing a manual. With the help of instruction sheets and embedded information in the pages, we have to solve all the puzzles to get out of the Escape Room. Only after solving one puzzle will the page number of the instruction sheet for the next puzzle be revealed.
“Despite some initial struggles to complete the tasks within the time limit, learning chemistry by solving puzzles in the Escape Room is much more interesting than sitting in class and learning from the textbook. In this way, I can remember everything related to the topics better.”
One of the experiments on biodiesel requires participants to mix a catalyst solution (made up of methanol and sodium hydroxide, also known as lye and caustic soda) pellets with vegetable oil. After shaking the container with the mixture for one minute, it is put into a box (called the oven) located near a window and heated at 180 degrees Celsius. When carried out successfully, this experiment creates a transesterification process that turns vegetable oil into biodiesel.
As biodiesel is mainly used for energy production, students are then asked to run through an example of it using biodiesel to get a key to unlock the door of the room. In order to do that, students are given instructions to extract a small amount of biodiesel using a pipette. They then drop the extracted biodiesel into a burner lamp. Using a fire gun, they carefully ignite the burner lamp and allow some time for the ice which encases the key to melt. When the ice has melted, students use a pair of tweezers to obtain the key. Once successful, they get closer to escaping the room!
Other than a physical Escape Room, another group of students from the University of Southampton Malaysia under Ng helped to digitalise the Escape Room so that students at schools do not have to come into contact with chemicals. This way, the activities are made much safer and the cost of conducting experiments is reduced drastically.
Through the digital escape room, students learn beginner to intermediatelevel coding to give instructions to the agent in the game in order to obtain the key and escape. Although there are benefits to the digital version of the Escape Room, the team found that students preferred the physical Escape Room.
SMKDJ Form Five student Wong Jia Xian said: “It was quite fun but a little bit tiring. Despite that, we learnt to communicate and collaborate better to complete the tasks. We were encouraged not to use the cheat codes to carry out the tasks.”
Ng added: “Through the digital Escape Room, lessons are also virtually accessible to students from different regions and not limited to one location.”