An escape room for families teaches fundamentals of evolution

UC Berkeley graduate students José Adan Arevalo and Emily Lam outside the inflatable escape room that is traveling to museums and libraries around the country to provide a fun way for families to learn about biology and evolution. Arevalo voiced some of the Spanish-language audio used in the game. A strange and mysterious plant is on the rampage, causing people to break out in itchy purple blotches! The premise of a new sci-fi movie or dystopian video game? No, it's the theme of a new escape room - an immersive educational adventure that families emerge from only after solving science puzzles to save the world from a prickly end. The game takes place in an inflatable space about the size of a small bus, decorated to look like a mobile lab and labeled VENOMventure - or aVENENOtura, in Spanish, since the exhibit is bilingual. Created by educators at the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum in Lawrence, VENOMVenture premiered in its final form over the last two weeks at the Berkeley Public Library, drawing rave reviews from one elementary-schooler and a thumbs-up from some 60 families that, thankfully, escaped without succumbing to the plant plague. "The escape room was so much fun,” 8-year-old Mizuki wrote in a letter to the children's librarian the day after her adventure. "Thanks for letting me try the escape room before it started.