Nikki’s Tech Team

The project
During Dutch Technology week (May 31 to June 5) in 2021, thousands of students completed the largest escape room in the Netherlands. It was an exciting game where students were challenged to use their digital skills while discovering how technology can help fight climate change. More than 80,000 students in primary and secondary education in the Netherlands have played the game.

I worked on this project with &ranj for FutureNL. My role was in concept development, narrative design, puzzle design, script writing, & video production.

The game
The protagonist in the game, teenager Nikki, has a mission: she wants to be the first to make a climate-neutral sailing trip around the world. She enlists the players as technical assistants to help her sail and navigate.

The game is a collaborative puzzle-solving game for a classroom setting. Teams of students, facilitated by their teacher, work together to solve as many puzzles as they can within a time limit. During the game, students discover how technology can contribute to a better world. The content of all the puzzles is developed based on national science and technology learning objectives. Teachers were explicitly considered in the design process to ensure that they needed no more than 20 minutes to prepare to facilitate the game.

There are two challenges that my design approach tackled successfully, and I would be happy to elaborate on how. The first challenge was that the time pressure that is a classic feature of escape rooms has a negative effect on learning. The second challenge was that we wanted an online game that can be played simultaneously by all kids in a class, but without putting young kids through an account creation process, and without unnecessary and expensive cross-platform multi-user technical development.