Educative Escape Game

The project

Museum Speelklok is a museum in Utrecht that recently build a new exhibition. This new exhibition guides students through three different processes in a music machine: music, machinery and program. With this exhibition they wish to show students the importance of mechanical engineering in today’s world.

For this project, the Museum wanted to build an escape game for secondary school students. A class is split into three different teams: music, machinery and program. Each team follows a different track. Throughout the game, students solve puzzels, answer questions, and complete interactive mini-games to repair a stolen musical machine. At the end of the experience, all teams come together to combine their final findings and finish the game as a class.

The project will be used by future classes who will visit the museum. Students will play with museum artifacts, mini-games and solve puzzels, all while learning about the importance of mechanical engineering.

My.... wifi... not....

The customer

Our client was the educational team of Museum Speelklok. The Utrecht based museum is all about Music Machinery. As described before, their goal is to teach students about mechanical engineering in music machines through a fun escape game.

We communicated once every two weeks. In our meetings we would discuss requirements for the application and share our ideas for games we would implement in the coming sprints. Moreover, each sprint we ended with a small demo, where we would share our progress, such that the client had a good overview of our progress thus far.

Our team lead, Tim, was in contact with the museum and received all updates and design guidelines through e-mail. Moreover, he was our spokesperson during all meetings. Other team member would add if necessary. All meetings have been documented by Dolf, who has written all the minutes.

The team

TeamTim consisted of six students (Anass el Guermat, Dolf van der Hert, Filip Heerkens, Rahul Ramdas, Rens Brouwer & Tim Verberne). Three students, Dolf, Rens and Tim study Data Science & Artificial Intelligence. The other students, Anass, Filip and Rahul, study Computer Science. Moreover, Tim and Rahul had experience working with museums before, and other team mates had experience with web development. This enabled us to combine our strengths and build a great application for the museum together.

The work was divided as follows: Anass and Filip were our core-developers. Dolf wrote all minutes during meetings, Rahul was our Scrum Master, Rens was our Product-Owner and Tim was our contact person and team lead.

Our sprints took two weeks, and we hosted four stand-up meetings in every sprint. During stand-up meetings we would discuss our progress and check if anyone needed help with their features. Tasks would be divided depending on the workload and we would shift people’s priorities if someone got stuck, such that they could work together to solve the problem.

The largest challenge we overcame was the fact that the exhibition was not finalized until halfway through the project. Though we did get a short description on the games the client wished to include in the project, a lot of details were missing. We solved this problem by creating templates we could easily integrate finalized puzzels into, which were developed later into the project. We discussed a lot with the client and shared our own ideas

We are very proud of two specific games, namely Blockly and Pitch Perfect. In Blockly, players are able to use a scratch-like interface to create a program a character follows. The goal of this character is to collect items in a maze. Pitch Perfect is a very fun game which uses microphone inputs to control a ball. In this game, players try to levitate the ball to go through holes, while singing “perfect” notes.

However, the thing we are most proud of, is collaboration. We worked together during the entire project. We supported each other when someone got stuck, but most of all, we learned to build software, together.

Laa laalala lalalaaa (singing pitch perfect notes)....

The technologies

Languages:

• HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• JSON

Tooling:

• CSS, CSS Prettier
• HTML, HTML Prettier
• ESLint
• JavaScript, JavaScript Prettier

Communication and documentation:

• Microsoft Teams (for client and TA communication and minutes)
• E-mail (for client communication)
• Google Drive (for minutes)
• Discord and Whatsapp (for team communication)