“I think starting with No. 1 seems reasonable,” she told the three first-year students —  Michael Cheng, Jena Lorman, and Tyler Morris — as they unsuccessfully scoured the room for a place to start. In their initial frenzied search, they had missed the glaring clue hanging over a surge protector. The label, with the number 1 written on it, marked it as the first puzzle.

“I feel like we have to unplug some things,” said Cheng, looking at all the cords in the surge protector.

His teammates agreed. But the question — and the point of the lesson — was what to unplug?

With another clue from Ge, participants figured out that the letters taped onto each of the plugs spelled a word. They then saw that they needed to unplug the cords that were not powering anything, because though they weren’t being used they were still drawing electricity from the outlet, a thing known as vampire or phantom energy waste.

Other tasks in the room involved sorting waste into the proper trash, compost, or recycling bins; consolidating two fridges; turning off unused lights; and finding a lock combination using a black light and clues from a rising thermometer.

While participants worked, a monitor displayed the time remaining and projection maps (provided by the city) showed how much of Cambridge had flooded in the elapsed time, driving home the time crunch involved.

“We think of this escape room as not identical to reality but as a sort microcosm,” said Wigglesworth. “It has stakes. You need to do these things in order to reach this certain goal, and you need to do these things quickly because there’s a time limit. That was what we liked about the escape room; it was going to communicate this sense of urgency and also that [change is] within people’s reach.”

Participants found it surprisingly informative.

“Hearing the setup of it, I didn’t think that I was going to be receiving any new knowledge,” said Morris. “It made me aware to how many things I didn’t know when it came to environmental sustainability. Like the vampire power; I’d never heard of that.”

Students from the Resource Efficiency Program have been working on the escape room since early fall, consulting with cities and universities that have run sustainability-themed escape rooms in the past and connecting with a local one, Red Fox Escapes, for advice on ensuring their narrative delivered the sense of urgency they sought.

Students also connected with representatives from Cambridge’s Community Development Department, who, along with their high school interns from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, are working on creating a similar room for the city in the fall. As a group, the interns and city employees led a beta test of the room. The results led to some final tweaks, like extending the escape time from 20 to 25 minutes and making certain clues clearer.

“Having made the puzzles and designed the rules, we had no idea whether the level of difficulty was correct, how long it would take, and whether [the puzzles] were intuitive or not,” said Kalena Wang ’20. “The beta testing helped a lot with the small details of connecting the tasks in the room, but it also helped a lot with the broader framing.”

Those small refinements ensured participants would have fun but also learn something. “It’s all put in a way that will make me remember it,” Morris said. “It will click for me next time, as opposed to just receiving just a flyer or a handout.”