IoT Escape Room Challenge

A line-drawing icon showing a wifi signal coming from a lock

Challenge Leads: Chad Sansing (@chadsansing), Martin Skelly (@mskelly), Michelle Thorne (@thornet)

Description

How can we build a healthier Internet of Things and get away from poorly designed devices?

That’s the question this IoT Escape Room Challenge tries to answer. Your job is to design and an inexpensive, portable IoT “escape room” and prototype facilitation and storytelling guides for it that let participants:

Feel safe and welcome interacting with one another and the connected devices in your room.
Have fun solving puzzles posed by those devices to “unlock” a way out of the room.
Fit super-comfortably inside the room’s frame with lots of personal space while including 3-5 people at a time.
Interact with common types of IoT devices mounted to the room’s frame to explore how they work with the web and interact with people.
Try to create interactions between objects such as conversations between home assistants.
Experience and understand generic, scripted, low-risk challenges posed by the devices like home-hacks, invasions of privacy, or malware infections.

An "escape room" is like a puzzle that surrounds you. By "solving" different parts of the room or finding clues hidden in it, you find the way out of the room. Imagine that you were playing a game and had to break a code to find a combination that opened a lock or follow a map to a key that unlocked a door; that's what an escape room is like.

You do not have to build an actual room or purchase any connected devices for this project (unless you want to). Instead, you can focus on inventing the designs for an escape room, the instructions for how to set it up, and the story "players" experience inside the room.

You can also make a paper prototype or cardboard prototype of your room to show how it works.

In fact, you can work any piece of the challenge like these and look for collaborators to take your work further together. You might:

Design a room.
Prototype a room.
Build a room.
Write puzzles for the room.
Write a guide for using specific devices.
Write a guide for teaching about IoT with the room.
Write a story to go along with a room.
Write code for running puzzles on IoT devices in a room.

In addition to imagining how the room might work, you should think of how your players wound up trapped in this room. Who imprisoned them? What’s at stake if they don’t solve the puzzle and escape?

The big idea is invent and prototype or build an inexpensive, lightweight, and portable IoT escape room for 3-5 participants at a time with a instructions, a teaching guide, and a story that go with it.

For example, if a library built a room using your design, then its staffers should be able to:

Build the room themselves from inexpensive, locally sourced parts.
Purchase or make any needed IoT devices or mock-ups at low cost.
Repeatedly program, set up, and reset the IoT devices using instructions you provide.
Repeatedly set up and facilitate the escape room experience using a guide you provide.
Easily break down, pack, and inexpensively ship the room to another library in the same network or region to share costs and programming.

Here are some ideas to get you started. Participants might use the devices to:

Figure out where they are or who has caught them in an IoT Escape Room decorated to suggest a particular place or person.
Research clues from a library’s collection to escape.
Find the right combination to unlock the IoT Escape Room.

Share your design in the IoT Escape Room folder of our Mozilla Privacy Arcade repo and keep us up-to-date on your work by tweeting at @MozLearn with the hashtag #mozsprint. More about repos below.

What Kinds of Skills Do I Need? What Kinds of Things Can I Make?

There are lots of ways to contribute to this project that use different skills and talents. For example:

Someone who loves to tell stories might contribute several escape room scenarios explaining how IoT devices might have malfunctioned (or did they?) and trapped the players.
Someone who loves puzzles might contribute several brain teasers associated with online safety ideas like encryption (codes), password strength, data collection, or surveillance.
Someone who loves to draw online or off might contribute sketches of a room that is decorated to go along with someone else's story or that includes devices suggested by another contributor.
Someone who loves to teach might write a facilitation guide for an escape room design.
Someone who loves working with technology might suggest several devices that would be good to use or write instructions for how to use or code a device in the escape room.

All of our contributors and their work deserve care and thanks.

If you're unsure of what to contribute or how to contribute a piece of work, never hesitate to ask a project lead for help. We are here to support you and will be answering questions throughout the sprint.

Are You New to Escape Rooms or the Internet of Things?

Whether you live in a connected home or are new to IoT or the Global Sprint, we want to make sure you feel welcome to contribute to the project of your choice.

These resources might be helpful to you if you’re wondering how to begin with the Internet of Things or escape rooms.

Beginner IoT Resources

Beginner Escape Room Resources

Can I Get To Work Before the Sprint?

Of course. It's fine to begin the sprint with work already in-hand. You should feel free to set up for the sprint however you'd like. You might:

Make some designs, puzzle, or story ideas for feedback during the sprint.
Put together a team to begin work now and continue it after the sprint. You can do this online through your network or in our project's issue tracker. You can also recruit a team to work face-to-face in your community.
Reserve space now to host a "site" or meet-up during the sprint (see more details about hosting a site below).

Just keep in mind that we're asking you to license the work openly so our everyone can use, adapt, and build upon your contributions (see more about licensing below).

How To Share Your Work

We’ve set up a repo for the projects you make in response to these challenges. You can check out what the greater Global Sprint community is up to on the 2017 Global Sprint landing page.

A repo is a repository - or collection of files - that belong together on GitHub. All the files contributed by everyone working on your project will eventually wind up in 1 repo so you can see each other's work, give feedback, and adapt it for yourself or your own communities.

If you are new to GitHub, it is totally fine to work on another platform, like in a Google Document, and to copy and paste your text into an issue or to share a link to your work through an issue. A project or challenge lead will put it into the master "repo" (repository), or collection of work, for you.

Please note that we’re asking all contributors to apply a Creative Commons-Attribution 4.0 license to whatever non-code contributions they make during the sprint. We’re asking contributors to license code contributions with the Mozilla Public License 2.0.

However you decide to work or whatever you make, there are lots of ways to contribute:

Spreading word about the Global Sprint beforehand through your professional and interest-based networks.
Organizing a team ahead of the sprint and helping it prepare.
Hosting a site, or meet-up, during the sprint for people in your community so they can work together in person.
Proposing helpful changes to other contributor's content with "pull requests," or requests to pull new content into older files to update them.
Crafting new content for the project and contributing it through pull request, issue, or link.
Sharing resources by filing an issue.
Sharing feedback by filing an issue.
GitHub vets, fork the repo and submit pull requests.

There is no wrong way to contribute, and project and challenge leads are here to answer your questions help you get your work into the repo. You should feel free and empowered to share your work before, during, and after the sprint on social media (like through blogs, Facebook, and Twitter), as well.

Thank you for your contributions to the challenges in our Mozilla Privacy Arcade project.

How To File an Issue on GitHub

GitHub can be challenging for new users. If you experience difficulty with it, you are not alone. We want to help you overcome those challenges or find a way to contribute that works for you.

For this project in the Global Sprint, we can use a feature called the "Issue Tracker" in GitHub to communicate with one another. It's kind of like a shared message board combined with a to-do list. To address an issue to a specific person, you add their name to the issue the same way you would to a tweet, like this for example: @chadsansing would address your message to Chad, one of our project leads.

If the Issue Tracker is too difficult to use, contact a project lead. We will work with you and help you find a way to contribute no matter what.

Here are some steps you can take to get started on GitHub if you'd like to try it.

First, create an account on GitHub.
Then visit our repo or the folder for the challenge you'd like to work on during the sprint.
Next, click on the "Issues" tab near the top of the page.
Finally, click on the green "New Issue" button to the left of the page. You can then title your issue and add content. Specificity helps.

Before you submit your issue, pick a label or two for it. You can choose one from the "Labels" dropdown menu to the right of your issue. Add the light-green #mozsprint label to each issue to file and then pick the label that goes with the challenge you're working on during the sprint. This helps people find the people and issues associated with the challenge to which they're contributing.

We have challenge labels for:

iot-escape-room-challenge (green).

We also have labels for site-related news, as well as for finding help and answering questions:

site-related is light purple.
help-wanted is red.
questions are blue.

After you apply all your labels, your issue should have a #mozsprint label, your challenge label, and possibly a site-related, help-wanted, or question label.

If you'd like to learn even more about GitHub, check out the GitHub for Collaboration section of Mozilla's Open Leadership Training Series.

How To Host a Site

If you organize a team for the Global Sprint or would like to run a "site" - like a meet-up at a community center or in a learning space or makerspace - visit this page to learn how to register your event.

Site leaders receive support from project and challenge leads to help people learn and work together face-to-face. They commit to being on-site from 9AM to 5 PM local time each day so they can:

Welcome people who come to work in-person.
Ensure that your site is a safe and friendly working environment for all.
Help to promote the Global Sprint to your communities and encourage local participation.
Serve as a point of contact for communicating (updates, progress) with the rest of the Sprint during the event.
Help to collect data on activities on the Site (number of participants and contributions).

If you would like to host and register a site, let a project lead know how to help. We will make sure you feel well prepared to host a site.

When To Sprint

This year’s Global Sprint runs for 48 hours from June 1st, 2017, to June 2nd, 2017. Sprint hours are 9 AM to 5 PM in your local timezone. You can sprint for a few hours, for a day, or for both days. You can contribute to 1 project or several. There is no wrong way to participate in the sprint.

How To Follow the Sprint Online

We will be curating and sharing your work throughout the sprint, so keep in touch and let us know how things are going at @MozLearn on Twitter using the hashtag #mozsprint.

You can also see "Featured Projects" on Mozilla's Network Pulse, our resource for sharing exciting events and resources with our community.

After the Sprint

We’d love to keep up with you after the Global Sprint, as well, to follow the development of your projects. We can also help you write a session proposal for this year’s MozFest.

Questions? File an issue and cc @chadsansing or email Chad.

Let’s go play.

MozillaFoundation / mpa-iot-escape-room-challenge

readme