Abstract
This year (2019) represents the 150th year since the discovery of the periodic table of the elements (PTOE). In honor of this important event, we designed a PTOE chemical escape room (called ChEsRm) that is suitable for middle and high school chemistry students. The main idea behind this ChEsRm is that it is relatively easy and inexpensive for teachers to build in order to introduce the activity into as many chemistry classrooms as possible. The puzzles of ChEsRm include interesting facts regarding the elements, their every day use, and their properties, as well as the subatomic particles. Some involve actual experiments and other nonlaboratory activities. Participants are asked to solve a mystery: finding the cause of a mysterious death. Although most escape rooms use locks and keys, in this case the mechanism used to reveal the solution is different and more flexible. Here we provide a detailed description of all the puzzles and explain how to operate the escape room in a school lab.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 132-136 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | Journal of Chemical Education |
| Volume | 97 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 18 Nov 2019 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 14 Jan 2020 |
Funding
The authors wish to thank the Weizmann Sustainability and Energy Research Initiative (SAERI), and the Ministry of Energy of Israel, for supporting this project. We thank Mor Moria Shipony for assistance with the graphical abstract. The ChEsRm escape room is based on puzzles developed by teachers during a workshop that took place in the summer of 2018. The workshop was conducted in the framework of the National Chemistry Teachers’ Center, the Ministry of Education. The escape room team (Malka Yayon, Vered Adler, Inbar Haimovich, Hagit Levi, Ehud Aviram, Ziv Ariely and Shelley Rap) designed and developed the puzzles. We would like to acknowledge the work of the following high school chemistry teachers in helping to design and implement the various puzzles in the chemistry escape room: domino (Bella Shkolnik, Adina Shenfeld), starch with iodine (Nava Meir), connect dots (Or Izqovich and Anat Feldenkrise), hydrogel (Dafna Yam, Sarili Berkowitz, and Frieda Elul), treasure maps with coins (Shlomit Etziony and Iris Shinar), slime (Edna Cohen, Sigi Mossinson, and Irit Ornan), chromatography (Genia Osovov and Shoshana Manor), envelope (Drora Vardi and Batia Lifshitz), and songs (Or Izqovich and Anat Feldenkrise). We would also like to acknowledge the work of Edna Cohen on the background story and Yarden Kedmi in discovering the mechanism with transparencies.
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- General Chemistry
- Education