Sustainability-themed escape room raises stakes during Harvard Heat Week
Once the door closed, participants had 25 minutes before flood waters swept them away. At least, that was the scenario three Harvard College first-year students walked into on Monday when they entered the sustainability-themed escape room created by the Office for Sustainability’s Undergraduate Resource Efficiency Program. The room ran April 22‒24 as part of Harvard Heat Week, a series of events intended to draw attention to the severity of the climate crisis. It presented participants with puzzles they had to solve to stop sea level rise from submerging parts of Cambridge and devastating Harvard’s campus. “We thought this would be a really cool way to get people to directly engage with some of those [environmental and sustainability] issues,” said Rosie Wigglesworth ’19, one of the students who organized the room. Their thinking was spot-on. The room attracted more than 100 Harvard community members, mostly undergraduates, and ran about 14 times a day over a...