The MMLI Escape room is a labor of love between students in THEA 591: Designing Immersive Experiences and INFO 418: Makerspace – Escape Rooms at the University of Illinois. Course students took the Molecule Maker Lab on as stakeholders for the semester immersing themselves in the world of MMLI researchers, bringing researchers in to test puzzles, and ultimately creating Lab 217.
Lab 217 is currently on display at the Beckman Open House for public participation. After Beckman Open House, MMLI is looking for a permenant home to host Lab 217 and allow interested community members to book experiences by request.
If you are interested in participating in or have suggestions for the new home of Lab 217, e-mail Sabrina at abdulla3@illinois.edu.
About the escape room
Once upon a time, Lab 217 was a functional lab housing a team of enthusiastic scientists. Unfortunately, the team of scientists were unable to get along, arguing instead of getting anything done. With the emergence of AI, lab leaders removed humans out of the equation to replace them with an all AI research team. Looks like that didn’t go well either…
The year is now 2323, and you have been tasked with breaking into Lab 217 and restoring the lab into a functional space to continue their research. Can you learn from the original team’s mistakes, or will you face a similar fate?
Creating the escape room
The process:
Goals throughout the process:
- Emphasizing teamwork through storyline and puzzles
- Capturing the essence of MMLI by having participants work in teams to combine different areas of expertise in AI and chemistry to achieve diverse goals.
- Create a scenario that demonstrates how the properties of new molecules is be predicted by tools at MMLI.
- Demonstrate how creation of new molecules is faster and easier through automation and block based chemistry (Chemical Lego Blocks)
- Showing participants how “democratizing access to work” can maximize who benefits from tools and data they are creating.
The science behind the escape room
No spoilers, but if you want to go into the escape room with fresh eyes, avoid looking at this section until you have experienced it!
Without spoiling the escape room, we can tell you that elements of the escape room are based off of ongoing work at the Molecule Maker Lab institute.
- Block based chemistry: Researchers at MMLI are using block based chemistry to break big molecules into 3 smaller pieces that can mix and match into thousands of combinations. This works because of a type of chemical reaction called suzuki coupling which allows particular molecule pieces to fit together like velcro. This allows machine learning algorithms to predict new molecules to test, but also lets people with little to no chemistry background make their own molecules! You can see block based chemistry in play via our Digital Molecule Maker!
- Solar cell research: One problem researchers at MMLI want to tackle is finding new molecules to act as organic solar cells. If you have ever seen one of those big, black solar panels that are commercially available, you have more than likely seen an inorganic, silicon-based solar cell. These have come a long way in reducing our energy usage, but several factors have prevented them from replacing non-solar energy usage. For example, they are quite large and rigid so they require a lot of flat space (like a field, or roof of a house) and even now are quite expensive. The hope is for organic solar cells to create more flexibility in cost as well as overall display of solar panels, opening the door to more possible integrations of solar energy in society. In identifying new possible organic molecules, scientists test for efficiency of the molecule (can it absorb sunlight as well as silicon solar cells can?) as well as stability (can it survive against sunlight, or does it break down quickly?).