Finding the Target Solution and its Concentration: A Chemistry Escape Room

This paper describes a physical chemistry escape room designed as an inquiry-based learning activity, developed at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Players work through a mini escape room lasting roughly 15 to 25 minutes, in which they must identify a target solution among four colourless liquids that is pH-neutral and highly electrically conductive, then determine its concentration. The tools provided are universal indicator paper, a conductivity meter, and a densitometer spindle, with the solution ultimately identified as aqueous sodium chloride. The author argues that embedding chemistry problems in a narrative, teamwork-oriented game structure can increase motivation and interest in chemistry, and that using everyday substances such as table salt, vinegar, and baking soda helps bridge scientific practice and daily life.

The activity is organised into six steps: reading the introduction, identifying the target solution through smell and pH and conductivity tests, determining its composition through one of three difficulty variants, locating the densitometer spindle via a molar mass code, measuring density and reading concentration from a density-concentration diagram, and entering the final code. Solutions are narrowed down by smell, which excludes an acidic vinegar-like sample, and by pH testing, which excludes a basic baking-soda sample. Conductivity readings then separate the remaining neutral solutions, with the target reading roughly 4,000 µS, while the distilled water sample shows near-zero conductivity. The density measured is approximately 1.070 g/mL, corresponding to a concentration of 10%.

The escape room has been used in several settings, including university research nights with families, school tours, a summer school team-building session, and children's university workshops for ages 6 to 12. The author reports consistently positive informal feedback, describing the activity as entertaining, appropriately challenging, and effective at fostering curiosity and collaborative problem-solving. The paper is a practice-oriented description rather than a controlled study, so its claims about learning outcomes rest on observational impressions and not on measured results.