Creating Our IoT Futures Together

Using an escape room to teach connected devices

For nearly a year, we’ve been working to bring the IoT Escape Room workshop to life. We’ve tested our design deck. We’ve recruited facilitators from within Mozilla and across allied communities of practice. We’re nearly ready to open the doors on March 8th in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

From our design deck

We believe in participatory learning, and this workshop 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.

Facilitators will join us from:

• Our Advocacy team.
• Our Gigabit team.
• Our NSF WINS challenge team.
• Our Open IoT Studio team.
• Our Open Leadership & Events team.
• Our Chattanooga Gigabit Fund community.
• Our network’s design community.
• Our network’s open data community.

At the end of the 2-day workshop, we’ll open the workshop to the public for a celebratory demo or gallery walk of everything participants have built.

If any of this sounds good to you, please consider joining us in Chattanooga in March! We would love to have you. You can register here, and here is a save-the-date tile you can share with others in your network.

Stay tuned for more shared resources this spring!

Have a question or suggestion about the IoT Escape Room event? Please email curriculum manager Chad Sansing or reach out on Twitter.