All first-year students (Grande Ecole Engineering Programme, Specialized Engineering Program, and Bachelor of Technology) took part in a back-to-school escape game called “Panic on Campus” to help them explore the campus in a unique way!
The scenario: "The director has disappeared, we must find the culprit."
The students were divided into groups of 7 to 8 people to solve the investigation consisting of 11 puzzles in different workshops and rooms. Each puzzle solved yielded a clue. Tick-tock, tick-tock... They only had 5 minutes to complete the task.
Each team started in a different location. Once in the starting room, they had to watch a video to guide them (bravo to Florence Lesage, Deputy Director in charge of training and PGE manager, for her acting skills). Next, the team had to open a trunk by finding a key date using a mastermind, 1806, obviously the date the campus was founded (easy!).
In the trunk was a tablet with a sheet of paper on which was written "connect to SAVOIR" ( Arts et Métiers educational platform). Once the platform was open, all the clues were there. The students wandered around the campus from room to room to solve the mystery.
The library, administration offices, FabLab, language lab, foundry, machine shop, materials laboratory, IT department, fluid mechanics department, and EEA (Electronics, Electrical Engineering, and Automation) department were all visited!
At the end, once all the clues had been gathered (letters such as "SY" or "V"), the students had to put together the first and last name of Sylvain Sourdet, the school administrator, who was also THE GUILTY PARTY! Finally, the investigators had to take a selfie with him to prove that they had found the kidnapper!
The students' feedback is positive: "Very nice, thank you for your efforts!!!", "Very entertaining and helps to build team spirit,""Ideal for getting to know the place and the staff!"
A big thank you to all the staff who led the workshops, especially Sylvie Albenque, Library Manager, Florence Lesage, both co-organizers with communications, and Nina Lepannetier, Educational Engineer atICIFTech, who managed all the technical aspects of SAVOIR!
Escape game: some examples of puzzles
FabLab puzzle: "Can you figure out the official name of this room? The machines might be able to help you."
Materials in the room: a wooden crossword puzzle with letters available (made in FabLab)
Numbers were stuck on the FabLab machines, and we had to find the names based on the numbers in the crossword puzzle, for example, "3D printer." When the crossword puzzle was complete, certain letters stood out thanks to black frames. Using these letters, we had to rearrange them to spell out the words "la fabrique des arts" (the arts factory).
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Administration puzzle: "Who's who?"
This puzzle was a memory game directly on SAVOIR. You had to match the photo portraits with the people's roles!
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Language room puzzle: "Travel, travel, throughout the kingdom, on the dunes of the Sahara, from Fiji to Fujiyama, travel, travel, don't stop, above the barbed wire, bombed hearts look out at the ocean. Got it in your head? Good. Now it's your turn to travel: identify the places and collect a geographical coordinate for each correct answer! These coordinates will give you the clue you've been looking for."
This challenge was a blind test on world monuments. A video was played with aerial photos of buildings, and the task was to find their names in order to collect numbers, which when put together gave the geographical coordinates of the Châlons campus!
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Materials lab puzzle: "89-81-8-7 = action! // 56-11-10 = banana // 71-6-53-9-68 = Lucifer // What if there was an additional code somewhere?"
Numbers were engraved on metal pieces scattered around the laboratory, and Mendeleev's table (the periodic table of elements) was hanging on the wall. The mission? To understand that the numbers on the metal pieces corresponded to the elements in the table and that they formed the word "Alloys" (13: Al / 3 = Li / 47: Ag / 99: Es) thanks to the chemical symbols.
