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Escape the Elements: How to Create a Science-Themed Escape Room

April 8, 2025

Escape rooms are a fun way to bond with others and put your critical thinking skills to the test! An escape room is a game where people are ‘locked in’ a room and must find a way out by finding clues and solving puzzles (Cambridge Dictionary, 2025). Escape rooms are popular because they are wonderful social bonding experiences where teams of people must work together to get out of the room.

In the past few years, several schools and universities started using educational escape rooms as an alternative method to teach students different subjects, ranging from math, history, science, and other subjects! One study had 62 students in Spain learn mathematical topics through an escape room model and found that it reduced learning anxiety while increasing motivation and learning achievement (Fuentes-Cabrera et al., 2020). Another study had 528 elementary school students go through either a virtual escape room or other digital game-based learning activities and found that the students preferred the digital escape room because it lead to higher collaboration and stronger motivation to learn among the students (Vidergor, 2021).

During my time at Georgia Tech, I’ve created two separate science-themed escape rooms from scratch with my friends and ran them both four times collectively. We had a lot of fun, and I learned so much about escape rooms – both making and playing them – in the process. I think escape rooms are a wonderful way for people to learn and apply their knowledge while being in a fun environment and bonding with people around them who share the same interests. There are many escape room templates online that you can use, but I want to make this guide if you want to make your own customizable escape room that tailors to your audience. In this guide, I’ll share some tips about making an escape room from scratch as well as some of my own experiences.

 

Step 1: Choose a Theme and a Storyline

Choose a theme based upon your intended audience. For example, my intended audience was college students who were in different science majors, so I incorporated elements (pun intended) from as many science fields as I could. If you are making an escape room for your biology class, make the room biology themed.

Once you have a theme, create a storyline about why they are in the room. Maybe an evil scientist is creating a formula to destroy the world, and they must figure out the formula to stop them! Maybe the room is part of a colony on Mars that lost power and communication with Earth and the crew (participants) need to work together to restore the colony’s original functions so they can get back, but they must do it quickly because oxygen levels are depleting fast! The more interesting the storyline, the more interested your players will be. The sky’s the limit with your storyline but ensure that it matches with the theme of the room and add in a specific reason for the time limit (e.g. oxygen levels depleting within the hour on the Mars colony). Both escape rooms I held involved an evil magician who performed strange alchemy experiments, and the participants were playing as detectives who got trapped inside the evil magician’s hideout. Be as creative as you want with your storyline!

 

Step 2: Determine a Game Flow Plan

Choose how you want your puzzles to be organized. Do you want your puzzles to be connected to each other linearly or do you want multiple puzzles that can be solved separately from each other?

I organized my puzzles into 5 puzzle sets with a final number at the end of each set. Each set had 3 to 4 puzzles that had to be solved in order but sets themselves could be solved independently of each other. For example, puzzle A1 had to be solved to unlock puzzle A2, but puzzle B1 could be solved without needing to solve A1. For the participants to escape, there was a final door code (found by writing all the numbers at the end of each set in a specified order on a whiteboard).

It’s up to you on how you want your puzzles to be organized, but it’s beneficial to have each puzzle lead to something else (unless it’s a red herring puzzle in which it will lead nowhere).

 

Step 3: Design Puzzles

Once you have your puzzle outline down, it’s time to make the puzzles! There are a variety of puzzle types you can choose from. This list below is not extensive, but these are some of the puzzle types I used:

  • Hiding secret messages in documents (letters, posters, newspaper clippings, etc.) by using CAPTIALS, bolding, italicizing, and underlining specific letters or words
    • If you want to make it more complex, you can use bolding and italicizing to create two different messages – one is a real message that leads to the next puzzle while the other message is a funny red herring but doesn’t lead to anything.
  • Locking items in boxes, cabinets, etc.
    • You can buy lock boxes from a store or you can punch holes into cardboard boxes and attach combination locks to them.
    • There are a variety of locks you can use: number locks, letter locks, among others.
  • Ciphers
    • Caesar cipher (each letter is shifted by a fixed amount)
    • Morse code (using dots and dashes for letters and numbers) – requires a key
    • Atbash cipher (alphabet is reversed; A becomes Z, B becomes Y, etc.)
    • Braille (using raised dots or gem stickers to form numbers or words) – requires a key
    • Pig Pen cipher (alphabet letters are replaced with parts of a grid or by a set of symbols) – requires a key
  • Putting a sequence of events in order which reveals a code
  • Counting the number of colored objects drawn on a board to reveal a code

There are many other puzzle methods you can use, but keep your intended audience in mind as you determine which puzzles to use. Try to avoid making your puzzles too complex or else your audience may not understand how to solve them which can lead to immense frustration.

 

Step 4: Determine How to Integrate Puzzles into Room

Once you make the puzzles, determine where you want to hide them! They can be hidden in locked places (boxes, cabinets, etc.) or they can be hidden in plain sight (e.g. a letter with a hidden message sitting on a table in the open). I recommend writing down the locations of each puzzle in your answer key, so setting up the room will be much easier (and you can find puzzles that you’ve hidden away in case you forget).

If your puzzles are interconnected with one another, determine how you’ll ensure they must solve the previous puzzle before continuing to the next one. I usually locked up the next puzzle in the sequence and participants would have to solve the previous puzzle to get the code for the lock.

Additionally, use props to bring the room to life! Use props related to the theme and storyline you’re doing for your escape room, and they don’t have to be expensive props. You can either use things you already have, make props, or buy props to bring the escape room to life. The more props you use, the more immersive the experience will be!

 

Step 5: Test and Adjust Puzzles (If Possible)

It is beneficial to test your puzzles and/or your entire room with people who are not doing the escape room (if you can) prior to your official date. A puzzle that is easy for you to understand may be difficult for someone else to understand, so testing out your puzzles ensures that the puzzles are not too complicated for your intended audience.

 

Step 6: Run the Escape Room!

You’ve done all the hard work in making the escape room, so now it’s time for the big day!

Some tips from my experience:

  • Make sure to either have an answer key or have the answers memorized in case the participants need help
  • Start setting up early! Make sure to have at least an hour or two hours for set up based upon how complex the room will be (more puzzles and decorations/props = more set up time)
    • Remove as many items as you can that are not related to the escape room to avoid confusion
  • Make sure to state the rules prior to participants starting the escape room (These are the ones I used but you can add more)
    • There is only key or code per lock
    • Don’t break the ceiling, walls, or any delicate furniture/technology
    • Don’t stand on the furniture
    • Don’t need to dig through the trash cans
    • You write using paper/pencils or whiteboards
    • They have X amount of time to escape (usually 45-60 minutes but ours lasted 2 hours because we had a complex set up)

 

Making an escape room can be daunting, but it’s an amazing adventure at the end of the day! It’s a rewarding experience for players and can be a fun educational experience where participants can learn while bonding with their peers.

Thanks for reading!

 

Bibliography

Cambridge Dictionary. (2025, January 29). escape room. @CambridgeWords. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/escape-room

Fuentes-Cabrera, A., Parra-González, M. E., López-Belmonte, J., & Segura-Robles, A. (2020). Learning Mathematics with Emerging Methodologies—The Escape Room as a Case Study. Mathematics, 8(9), 1586. https://doi.org/10.3390/math8091586

How to Make an Escape Room at Home: DIY Guide. (2024). Escapely. https://escapely.com/how-to-make-an-escape-room/

Vidergor, H. E. (2021). Effects of digital escape room on gameful experience, collaboration, and motivation of elementary school students. Computers & Education, 104156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2021.104156

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  Timothy Durham was convicted of rape when a test showed his DNA genotype matched the DNA recovered from the crime scene. Eye witnesses testified that Durham was in a different state at the time of the incident, but he wasn’t exonerated from his 3000 year sentence until follow up DNA analysis showed that the preliminary forensic analysis used in the trial was misinterpreted (Thomas et al.). DNA testing serves an invaluable part in our criminal justice system, but it comes with complications and bias that can lead to wrongful convictions and misinformed juries.  

Background:

Forensic genetics aims to identify the origin of a biological sample. It can be traced back to Karl Landsteiner who discovered human ABO blood groups. With blood groups, suspects could be eliminated based on their blood type. For example, if a suspect had type A blood and there was type B blood left at the scene by the perpetrator, the investigators could rule out the suspect. Unfortunately, the reverse didn’t work. If the suspect and perpetrator both had the same blood type, it can’t be concluded that the suspect was guilty. Blood identifiers evolved into 8 distinct categories which improved the ability to eliminate suspects, but could only conclude that (if the system matched) it might be the perpetrator or this person might be related to the perpetrator (Jobling and Gill). The field evolved in the 1980s with the discovery of Minisatellites, lines of repetitive DNA that don’t encode proteins. Minisatellite patterns in DNA create what we know today as the DNA fingerprint, and it has a much higher accuracy rate than previous methods (Augustyn et al.). Around the same time, a breakthrough for victims of sexual assault was discovered. In the case of assault, bodily fluids of both the victim and the assaulter can get mixed. A process called differential lysis was created which could selectively increase the concentration of sperm in a fluid sample thereby allowing for accurate DNA testing (Jobling and Gill). Forensics evolved to use single-locus probe testing after several years because of its ease of interpretation. It looked at specific minisatellites that had high variability between subjects. This was the first DNA-based method to be used in a criminal investigation. Two murder homicides from several years apart were connected using DNA evidence. The evidence was then used to exonerate an innocent man, and the guilty party was found when he tried to evade mandatory DNA testing for all men in the small town. His guilt was then reinforced when the DNA profiles matched, and he gave a confession (Jobling and Gill). Finding DNA at a crime scene doesn’t guarantee that you’ll find a murderer. There are issues with non-pure samples and limited samples that make DNA work difficult, and accreditation of facilities and new techniques and take time (Jobling and Gill).  

Subjectivity of DNA Interpretation:

In a 2009 publication, the National Academy of Science discusses the possibility for subjective influence in lab based forensics. The interpretation bias happens in complex cases where, for example, there could be a mixture of DNA. A study published in 2011 looked specifically at this issue. A gang rape happened in Georgia, and the mixture in DNA from the case was used to prosecute one suspect after another suspect took a plea bargain to testify against him. With DNA mixtures, there are three possible conclusions: suspect excluded, suspect cannot be excluded, and inconclusive. If the suspect is excluded, it means that there’s little to no possibility that his DNA is part of the sample. If the suspect cannot be excluded, it means that there’s a possibility that his DNA is part of the sample. In the trial, the DNA examiners who knew the context of the case concluded that the suspect being prosecuted could not be excluded. The 2011 study gave the DNA evidence from this case and the DNA profiles of the suspects to 17 forensic examiners. These examiners had no context of the case, and they all worked independently. Of the 17, only 1 came to the same conclusion (suspect cannot be excluded) as the examiners who knew the context of the case. Twelve of the 17 concluded that the suspect who was prosecuted and convicted had no relation to the DNA found in the sample. Not only does this show that subjectivity occurs due to the context of the case, but the 17 examiners came up with different findings based on their past experiences meaning that not all DNA analysis is objective. Some organizations like the Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods say that quantitative statistical evidence should be presented with every categorical conclusion, but the US doesn’t require this (Dror and Hampikian).

False Positives:

There are two categories that cause wrongful identification in a DNA report: coincidental matches and false positives. Coincidental matches are DNA matches between two unrelated people. The probability of these matches is about 1 to 500,000 for white individuals and about 1 to 350,000 for black individuals. This small probability of coincidental matches makes people feel confident in DNA evidence. False positives, on the other hand, are matches between DNA and test DNA that result from issues in the forensics lab. There have been multiple cases of forensics labs accidentally switching victim and suspected rapist DNA which lead to convictions that were later overturned when the lab realized the error. There are also cases of misreading or misunderstanding a sample. In a case from 1993, a man was convicted of rape because someone interpreted a mixed sample of victim and perpetrator DNA as an individual sample. The conviction was again overturned. To prevent false convictions, retesting DNA is allowed, but it’s not an efficient solution. Many people are pushing for statistical information on the probability of false positives, so that the jurors can make accurate judgements based on DNA evidence (Thomas et al.).  

Conclusion:

DNA analysis is a useful tool for the criminal justice system, but subjectivity can be an issue in forensic testing. To combat wrongful convictions, there are organizations like The Innocence Project who use DNA testing to free the innocent, but reformed forensic testing standards should be put in place to prevent subjectivity and to ensure juries are correctly informed during trials. https://www.innocenceproject.org/    

Citation:

Augustyn , Adam, et al. “DNA Finerprinting.” Encyclopedia Britannica , 26 Apr. 2018, www.britannica.com/science/DNA-fingerprinting#ref153186. Dror, Itiel E., and Greg Hampikian. “Subjectivity and Bias in Forensic DNA Mixture Interpretation.” Science & Justice, vol. 51, no. 4, 2011, pp. 204–208., doi:10.1016/j.scijus.2011.08.004. Jobling, Mark A., and Peter Gill. “Encoded Evidence: DNA in Forensic Analysis.” Nature Reviews: Genetics, vol. 5, no. 10, Oct. 2004, pp. 739–751., doi:10.1038/nrg1455. Thompson, William C, et al. “How the Probability of a False Positive Affects the Value of DNA Evidence.” Journal of Forensic Sciences, vol. 48, no. 1, Jan. 2003, pp. 1–8., doi:10.1520/jfs2001171.