Project

Misinformation is a pressing global issue; it is increasingly easy to post false or misleading information on the internet and reach massive audiences. Alongside the Center for an Informed Public, Puzzle Break, and The Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA), we created an online escape room to mimic the psychological and emotional responses elicited by real life interactions with digital misinformation. The aim of the escape room is to equip players with the necessary skills to identify misinformation online and become savvy, skeptical digital citizens.

Our Role

We started the escape room with the puzzles predesigned. The puzzles had white backgrounds and had a lot of bugs (for instance the escape room would not run on Firefox, there were gamebreaking site routing issues, and draggable components worked poorly).

On the front end, we polished the puzzle visually, fixed several critical bugs, streamlined the puzzle's story, refactored the code for future teams, and performed user research.

On the back end, we deployed an API to store puzzle passwords, authenticate admin users, modify and authenticate game access passwords, track user metrics, and access and sort user metrics.

To us, our sponsors were mentors and clients. We consulted with our sponsors to get feedback on new designs and we discussed results of user testing. In addition to this, we implemented many narrative changes they requested over the course of capstone.