Twice per semester, a third-floor room in Victoria College transforms into a portal to the past. Students enrolled in HPS 205 (Science, Technology, and Empire) step inside for an hour to see two historical spaces they’ve studied in class re-created in three dimensions with the help of antique objects, replicas, and sound effects. During that hour, in teams of four, they must use what they’ve learned to solve a series of puzzles. The solution to each puzzle provides a clue to the next one, and ultimately leads to completing a final task —a ticket out of the room. These escape rooms aren’t just fun and games, they are the midterm and final assessments for the course.
Professor Elise K. Burton, a historian of the life sciences, first designed this course in Winter 2022 for the Institute of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST). The first offering of the course relied on bread-and-butter assignment types for HPS: research proposals and an annotated bibliography leading to a term paper. “I wasn’t satisfied with this version,” Burton says. “HPS 205 is meant to be an introductory course, and it might be the only history of science course many students ever take. I wanted to find a way they could somehow experience history.”
The seeds for the escape room idea appeared in another class taught by Burton: a graduate seminar in which PhD students had to develop their teaching skills by developing their own undergraduate course and appropriate teaching materials. Challenged with the task of planning a tutorial activity, Oubai Elkerdi, then a first-year flex-time PhD student at the IHPST, took the opportunity to be creative. He presented Burton with a 14-minute video describing an escape room activity using content from his hypothetical course, complete with diagrams of the room layout, images of historical objects to be used in the puzzles, and a strong pedagogical rationale.
Reflecting on that experience, Elkerdi recalls: “I had recently tried my first escape room and was struck by how immersive it felt. I thought: what if we did an escape room, but with actual historical situations or replicas of primary sources? The goal was to make learning hands-on, to let students feel what it means to work with history, not just read about it.”
“Science is often thought of as a cerebral activity,” Elkerdi reflects, “but I wanted students to get a taste of the practice. We can tell them about instruments and experiments in class, but when they can feel it, when they see it, it makes a much bigger impact.”
“I had never tried playing an escape room before, but Oubai’s idea blew me away,” Burton says. “I decided that his escape room was too good to leave behind as a thought experiment.” She emailed the Director of the IHPST, Edward Jones-Imhotep, describing Elkerdi’s idea and asking for departmental support to build a real escape room as a teaching tool. Jones-Imhotep warmed to the idea immediately, writing back: “You had me at ‘escape room’.” After several planning meetings, he allocated Pedagogical Innovation and Experimentation funds to adapt Elkerdi’s original idea for an existing HPS course: the next offering of HPS 205, in Winter 2023.
Burton and Elkerdi worked for the rest of 2022 to re-conceptualize the assignment structure of HPS 205 to include two escape room assessments and short follow-up reflection papers. Elkerdi closely studied the course content of HPS 205, using his undergraduate training as an engineer to develop two unique escape room layouts and sets of puzzles: “My engineering background definitely helped,” Elkerdi explains. “But designing puzzles that are both fun and historically meaningful was a challenge. You don’t want to make light of serious topics like colonialism or slavery. At the same time, there are many ways we already engage with history through constructed experiences: museums, exhibitions, even films. The escape room was just another medium, one that invites students to participate actively rather than passively receive information.”
The task of collecting the physical materials to make them real, though, fell to Burton. “This was a thrilling opportunity for me to dig back into my interests in theatre,” says Burton. “As an undergraduate I completed a minor in theatre and I really loved costume design, set design, even stage management.” She worked with other IHPST PhD students and colleagues to buy, rent, and borrow antique items and passable replicas to use as props to turn the escape rooms into immersive experiences. Selecting the objects that students would handle directly to solve puzzles proved the greatest challenge. “Some of the historical items we needed simply weren’t available ready-made, or antique ones we bought were too fragile to be handled by dozens of students,” Burton says. “I had to get really creative with building key props by myself. Sometimes Oubai and I had to go back to the drawing board and design a new puzzle. With both escape rooms, it was down to the wire on getting everything ready in time for the students!”
Although Elkerdi could not observe the students’ reactions firsthand, he hopes the experience conveyed “the excitement of discovery that makes historical research so rewarding.” To assess how students responded to this innovative form of learning, Professor Burton collected anonymous reflections and course evaluations after the first offering of the escape room. The feedback revealed that students found the format not only enjoyable but also intellectually stimulating and memorable: precisely the kind of engagement Burton and Elkerdi had hoped to inspire. Here is a selection of the anonymous student comments:
The escape room was a joy for me as it appealed to my love of problem-solving. I was motivated to draw connections between and enhance my understanding of course concepts because I wanted to be rewarded with the tangible satisfaction of “escaping” the room. […] it was a good balance of guided, self- and team-directed learning that solidified by learning and understanding.
The escape room enhanced my learning by creating a far more memorable evaluation than a traditional midterm. The teamwork and time pressure made completing it feel like we triumphed together as a group.
The escape room forces you to enter the mindset of individuals in history to learn and use the tools of the past which gives you a perspective on what their thinking could have been.
Instead of answering questions through memorization, I was able to retain more information from lectures through the active recall method. I was able to have valuable discussions with my group as we discussed the connections between lectures and our understanding of science and empires.
The escape rooms were one of the most creative methods to test our knowledge and apply ourselves. It was incredibly fun and it really shows how much the professor cares about the learning of her students and the topic.
Burton is teaching HPS 205 again in Winter 2026, and looks forward to updating the escape rooms for the next group of students. “I’m always looking for new ways to improve the experience, new props that bring another aspect of the course content to life. I’m always spotting old objects and thinking ‘oh, that would be a great addition to the escape room!’” she laughs.
Want to see what it's like inside the escape room for HPS 205? Don't wait, watch the video!