Escape rooms are physical adventure games where players solve a series of puzzles and riddles. Using clues and hints participants focus on completing a series of tasks within a set time frame. Because participants of escape rooms interact with a variety of challenging problems in an experiential manner they are of interest as active learning tools. To engagingly accommodate a broad audience, however, the puzzles in traditional escape rooms have limited requirements for specialized participant skills or knowledge. In contrast, ChemEscape strives to both engage and have participants enhance and apply discipline specific skills and knowledge during puzzle solution. This is achieved by incorporating opportunities to learn about objectives and hands-on problem-solving skills typical of research-based experiences. Described herein are four hands-on general chemistry puzzles for use in the novel Battle Box design at the grade 4–12 level and first year general chemistry.

Gamification of learning in chemistry education is a growing field. Chemistry themed escape room activities, incorporating course learning objectives into puzzle solution, have become a popular tool allowing for students to apply course knowledge in novel settings. Escape room activities, like their public counterparts, provide subtle guidance to students through the introduction of clues and hints within the game. However, many students are met with mild frustration at the lack of direct questioning leading to time-restraints in puzzle solution. Here, we introduce a new series of ChemEscape Battle Box puzzles focusing on chemical equilibria, redox chemistry, and thermodynamics. By incorporating guiding, exam-style questioning into the puzzle we found students were more readily able to solve the puzzles within and related them back to course learning objectives.

The synthesis of six tetrathia–oligothiophene macrocycles is described with modest ring-closing yields between 21 and 55%. Single-crystal X-ray studies of four of the macrocycles indicated that encapsulated solvent or guest molecules were possible. A variety of guest molecules were explored for inclusion complexes via NMR, absorption, emission, and X-ray techniques. The solution-phase inclusion complexes were uninformative; yet the solid-state experiments revealed that solvent exchangeable channels exist through the macrocyclic pores.

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