Project leads: Chad Sansing and Katie Hendrix
At Mozilla, we believe in participatory learning, and this IoT Escape Room workshop model gives us the chance to unpack Internet health issues associated with connected devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) — like Privacy & Security — in fun, social, and collaborative ways.
By building and documenting an escape room prototype with activists, educators, and librarians, we hope to create a kit that our participants and their organizations can use, share, adapt, and replicate to teach their communities about the opportunities connected devices bring to our daily lives and the challenges they present to our individual and collective privacy and security.
Working within the framework of our Open Leadership Map (now in public beta), we’ve worked to design and build an event that will empower participants to:
- Understand the Internet health issues presented by connected devices and why we’ve approached them this way.
- Share innovative, fun resources for teaching Internet health and the methods we used to develop them.
- Invite and include participants from their communities to co-create similar projects
In terms of community interactions, we’re focused on:
- Creating together: We want participants to build their own IoT Escape Room.
- Soliciting ideas: We want prototypes to come from participants’ suggestions, not ours.
- Learning through use: We want participants’ direct feedback on the workshop so we can improve it, document it, and share it.
- Enhancing value exchange: We want workshop participants to finish with a kit they can inexpensively share and replicate.
- Networking common interests: We want to activists, educators, and librarians interested in IoT to attend and then spread this work after the event.
Workshop topics include:
- Community participation guidelines.
- How the Internet works.
- How Gigabit networks work.
- How connected devices and IoT work.
- What kinds of interactions you can have with connected devices.
- How the design process works.
- Prototyping puzzles, stories, and documentation for an IoT Escape Room.
We work intentionally to recruit facilitators from diverse backgrounds and with a variety of expertise. For example, for our first workshop, facilitators joined us from:
- Mozilla's Communications team.
- Mozilla's Gigabit team.
- Mozilla's NSF WINS challenge team.
- Mozilla's Open IoT Studio team.
- Mozilla's Open Leadership & Events team.
- The Chattanooga Gigabit Community Fund network.
- Our network’s design community.
- Our network’s open data community.
At the end of this 2-day workshop, we opened the workshop to the public for a celebratory gallery walk of everything participants have built.
If any of this sounds good to you, please let us know how to help you take next steps! We would love to be of service.
Have a question or suggestion about the IoT Escape Room event? Please email curriculum manager Chad Sansing or reach out on Twitter.
Everything in this repo and in the Google Drive folder sharing the same materials is openly licensed for re-use.
These materials are meant for activists, educators, librarians, and technologists who want to replicate this workshop or any part of it for their communities.
This repo is meant to provide methods and examples to use in facilitating your own IoT Escape Room workshop.
It's our hope that you can use the activities, methods, and materials described in this repo to facilitate your own version of an IoT Escape Room workshop in your community.
There are 4 major components to the repo:
- Day 1
- Day 2
- Materials
- Examples
Within each day, we've split agenda items into "activities" and "methods."
- Activities tend to unfold the same way each time with relatively similar outcomes as directed by facilitators.
- Methods tend to unfold differently each time and include some kind of consensus-building process involving all participants in setting the direction for the workshop.
Please let us know if this seems like a useful distinction for you and your facilitators.
Day 1 includes several leveling activities meant to establish common background knowledge amongst participants about
- The Internet.
- Gigabit networks.
- Online privacy & security issues.
- The Internet of Things and connected devices.
- Design.
- The IoT Escape Room challenge itself.
Day 1 also includes a method for choosing a theme and audience for the work by consensus.
Day 2 is meant to be a more open, emergent, and sprint-like experience as participants document their work, identify an audience and create a story for their escape room, and build the prototypes they want to use to get people asking questions about privacy & security on connected devices.
We've included the methods we used to help participants form working groups and communicate with one another to develop the story, prototypes, and documentation they need to build and share an IoT escape room with their communities in places like libraries, schools, and community centers.
Special printables and materials are available inside the repo's "materials" folder. You should source generic supplies like craft materials, sticky notes, and tape from wherever you normally do.
We've invited participants to share artifacts from their work at past workshops with us and the broader IoT Escape Room community. In this folder you'll find photos, snippets of code, and other pieces of documentation meant to inspire prototypes in future workshops.
Check out this amazing set of toolkits from Ideas of Things.
If you have any questions about this workshop model, this repo, or running your own IoT Escape Room event, please feel free to contact either project lead, Chad Sansing or Katie Hendrix, to talk shop, offer feedback, and ask questions.