URBANA — Imagine being locked inside a room and your only hope of escape is to solve a series of puzzles within one hour and crack the code for a quantum computer. That’s the premise of the Quantum Salvation escape room from LabEscape in Urbana.
The escape room honors the International Year of Quantum, challenging participants to use the power of curiosity, communication, and collaboration to lead themselves to victory, said Paul Kwiat, a physics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who founded the nonprofit LabEscape in 2016.
Kwiat works with a dedicated team of undergraduate and graduate students and volunteers to design innovative puzzles that are grounded in real-life science concepts.
“[O]ur mission originally was just to show people that science — quantum science, but just science in general — can be certainly relevant and accessible to them,” Kwiat said. “You don’t necessarily need to have a bunch of math or something like that to understand how 3D glasses work, for example.”
The Quantum Salvation escape room requires no prior knowledge of quantum science — in fact, having prior knowledge may not necessarily help, as U of I chemistry grad student Micah Robinson found out on a recent visit.
“It’s actually a kind of cool concept, because my brain was thinking about, ‘…How I can use all of [what Kwiat] taught me in the beginning in order to escape?’” Robinson said.
Curiosity, communication and collaboration are key
Robinson joined me and several of our grad student friends to visit LabEscape earlier this month.
We walked into the sparsely decorated room in the U of I’s Digital Computer Laboratory and found desks and filing cabinets lining the perimeter of the room. Seemingly random objects were scattered about: a container of oatmeal, a microscope and several locked boxes. A large screen TV was mounted on the wall.
Kwiat, who served as our wise sage on this journey, waved his arms to beckon us in as a Skype video chirped onto the screen. The fictional Professor Schrodenberg soon appeared.
“Thank you for coming,” Schrodenberg said. “There’s a new variant that we call the Omega Zika that rapidly causes near-total memory loss and spreads even more rapidly than the COVID Omicron variant.”
Our task? Use Schrodenberg’s quantum computer to find a cure to the Omega Zika virus.
“And please hurry,” she said. “If we don’t stop the spread of this virus immediately, the consequences of the world could be catastrophic.”
The vibe in the room was enthusiastic, determined and chaotic. My friends and I begin our frantic search throughout the room, looking for clues.
Over the course of the next hour, we got acquainted with scientific concepts, including infrared cameras, polarized light, thermochromic plates, Tesla coils and quantum entanglement.
The advice Professor Kwiat gave us before we began, emphasizing the importance of teamwork, turned out to be critical.
“We always stress that people should, as much as they can, remember the three Cs of curiosity, communication, and collaboration,” he said.
Our team found that with so many puzzles in the room, problem solving had to be performed cooperatively — similar to how real scientists have to work together.
Cultivating an appreciate for science
Teamwork ultimately led us to victory in the nick of time.
We gathered up all our clues, punched in the passcode for the quantum computer — and it worked! We watched the quantum computer cool down on the TV screen, and then an animation of the Omega Zika Virus exploded before our eyes.
We walked away feeling triumphant. After the escape, I asked my friends how they felt about it all. U of I chemistry graduate student Catherine Jalomo said she noticed parallels between the escape room experience and grad school.
“It’s cool when you could get to solve a specific problem instead of one that you make up yourself,” she said.
I can totally relate to what Catherine shared. The escape room was really fun and it was satisfying to watch all the clues fit together perfectly. There was a clear goal, and one right answer to solve the puzzle — which is so different from what we do in science daily.
In our work as graduate researchers, everything is so much more complicated than you’d expect. There are no clear-cut answers; sometimes all you’re left with is more questions.
Kwiat said he and his student employees design the escape rooms to foster curiosity about science in a way that is fun and immersive— not necessarily to teach people a bunch of facts.
“That to me is enough, for people to just have an appreciation that science is something that if they’re willing to devote any attention to it, they can actually get answers that are meaningful to them that could… improve their lives in some way,” he said.
New escape room experiences yet to come
The escape room is a bonding experience for people, said Sharon Edward, a LabEscape participant who had come with her own group of graduate student friends.
“I think it’ll be cool to have our shared knowledge and have fun with it in this way,” said Edward, who is a U of I graduate student in mechanical science and engineering. ”It’s kind of like a bonding activity for us, more than hardcore science.”
Kwiat said he hopes to familiarize the public with quantum physics and quantum computing through the narrative of the Quantum Salvation escape room. It’s a theme that’s both timely and relevant because of the potential that this technology has to advance things like computation, solar cell design and drug discovery.
“We definitely want the public to be cognizant of what’s coming, to be able to help us with coming up with new applications and also to be able to participate in a meaningful way in some of the discussions that will be coming or that need to be coming about ethical issues,” Kwiat said.
He has noticed that people enjoy coming to the escape room because it gives them a feeling of achieving, solving or conquering something.
“That’s also why people like science, is that ‘Oh, we can do something that no one’s done before and it was not necessarily easy to do,’” Kwiat said. “People need to learn that it’s fine for something not to be easy to do.”
Since its debut, he said LabEscape has had more than 15,000 visitors. After the COVID-19 pandemic, it moved from its prior location inside Lincoln Square Mall to the Digital Computer Laboratory on the University of Illinois campus.
The LabEscape missions are designed to be accessible to all participants ages 12 and up.
In May, LabEscape will debut a new escape room titled, “Dark Matter Devastation,” with brand new puzzles.
Other Champaign-Urbana events spreading awareness about quantum science include the World Quantum Day outreach events through IQUIST, the Quantum Voyages performance at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and the world’s first publicly available quantum network at The Urbana Free Library.