Inside the Nebula Dawn
By Anju Kakkar and Saran Davaajargal
At Humber Polytechnic, innovation often arrives not with fanfare but through curiosity, collaboration, and experimentation. That spirit pulses at the heart of Escape Humber, a Priority 3 project that transforms education into something immersive, playful, and deeply human.
Led by faculty from Multimedia Design & Development, Theatre Production and Web Development programs, the project uses an educational escape room format—powered by Extended Reality (XR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and gamified design—to foster cross-disciplinary learning, teamwork, and real-world problem-solving.
This isn’t just a classroom innovation—it’s a hands-on, hearts-in approach to learning that prepares students to be agile, creative, and ready for the complexities of the future.
We sat down with the project’s faculty leads to decode the thinking behind the puzzles, the power of interdisciplinary collaboration, and the role of play in reimagining teaching and learning.
Inspiration for the project
HP: What inspired you to pursue the idea of escape rooms as “living classrooms”?
Robert Blain (Multimedia Design & Development): As we are in academia, we have courses and students who are coming through every year. And what we wanted to try and do was bridge that gap in the classroom—so when you go into the escape room, you can play a puzzle. But there are also learning materials for how to build that puzzle. And as we keep growing it, people could then design and make their own puzzles.
Tanya Greve (Theatre Production): With my students in theatre production, they just want to get their hands dirty and build things. At one point where I was trying to figure out what things the students should build because we usually do shows and installations. Sean and I had a conversation pre-pandemic where we were like, “Escape rooms? Should we build one?” My faculty got totally excited. And then, it became a larger conversation about, “How do we integrate it into the rest of the curriculum properly?” But a lot of the time, especially with shows, you build something, you do the show, the show ends, and it gets tossed in a dumpster. So this was a marvellous way of taking something the students built and having some level of longevity to it, as well as being able to see the interconnectivity of stuff that they don’t know in something that’s built with wood, paint, and props.
Sean Doyle (Web Development): For the theatre folks, the puzzle of building a set where the audience has to be in the set—it has to be an audience-proof set—was an interesting challenge.
HP: What makes escape rooms uniquely effective for improving learner outcomes?
RB: If you look at some of the academic research, there is a small body of work that speaks to this. They found that doing the escape room or the gamification of learning has been an effective process. They surveyed students, and they found that students enjoy this method. One of the big things that they have flagged, though, is that the time to actually build an escape room as part of your normal classroom is often difficult. With this project, specifically, we were able to go to Innovative Learning at Humber and get some buy-in from them before we tried to commit too much time and effort because it’s a big undertaking.
SD: As Tanya mentioned earlier, this escape room has this perpetuity to it, where the challenge can be to either remodel it or start from scratch. We can pull out a puzzle and make that a learning component for different courses or have students redesign that component. There’s the modular and ongoing nature of it. I think that makes it different from anything else I’ve seen.
TG: There is also tremendous buy-in from the students. There is not a day that goes by when there isn’t a student from some other program peeking in that room and going, “What is that? Is that an escape room? Cool!” It’s ballooned a bit beyond even what we were imagining when we were just imagining this project to begin with.
A Living Curriculum Across Disciplines
HP: Can you share examples of how different disciplines are involved in the design and development of the escape room?
TG: Every single person in my theatre production program has had their hands on the physical building of the escape room. We’ve integrated it into our Experiential Learning Course, so there are 70 students who have had their hands either in the physical building of the room itself or they’ve built props for it. They’ve built weird aliens and things that link to the actual space. Other students have built dummy panels that mirror the real puzzles and make the room a little more fulsome. Our lighting students have created the lighting for the room. They’ve learned how to do LED lighting within the context of the piece. Our sound students have created all the sounds you’ll hear in the experience. Our video students have created the immersive video. With that, there are around nine or ten faculty that are interconnected. For my program, there are about four courses that are directly connected, and then the whole student body of both first and second year are fully involved in the creation of the piece. That’s why we’re pushing to get it done before they graduate.
SD: In the digital realm, what’s so exciting about working with the theatre folks is that they’ve been mastering interdisciplinary collaboration for literally millennia. [The partnership]was fun for us—discovering those gaps, discovering that language together, and building those bridges together. It’s been fun. We’re richer. I would say I’m richer as a faculty member for this collaboration.
RB: The biggest challenge was getting the room built. But once we finally get this built, the next thing is, for me specifically, to use this in my classes as assignments. If you want to remake, say, the intro video when we’re learning how to make videos, shooting and editing things. It is an example of where it could go. Some of the exciting next steps are future collaborations within the programs and clusters, as well as with some of the other clusters.
From Tech Curiosity to Tech Integration
HP: How do emerging technologies enhance the educational aspect of the escape room?
RB: I still like learning—that’s one of the reasons why I’m here. With puzzles, sometimes we came up with many different ideas, and [we knew exactly how to do some of them]. There are others that we don’t know how to do, but I think that’s what we wanted to learn, and then hopefully pass on some of those materials to students and the Humber community at large. We also made our own assistant—we thought, “Well, what if we made our own Alexa and we call it the Oracle?” Essentially, it’s allowed us to go and learn—when you start talking to a smart assistant in your house, what are all the different little things that are going on there and all the little pieces that need to be figured out? And it’s been a really interesting experience to go through that and make something that is still in development right now. It starts to touch on things like Artificial Intelligence and how it comes into the world. You begin to see how these things are done.
SD: What’s great about using Artificial Intelligence is that it can remove a lot of the technical barriers. You can have an idea, and you have this helper [called AI] that can help you with parts and pieces of it. My takeaway from this project has been that we can use it as a helper—not necessarily to do the work for you, but to get you started and get your idea to come to life.
HP: How do you see this project contributing to the three pillars of Humber’s Building Brilliance vision—driving impact, reimagining learning and deeper partnerships?
SD: I teach web development, and one of the puzzles I’m designing as a learning module for my students covers something we don’t usually cover in the curriculum. In terms of impact, my hope is that it has them thinking beyond the screen of a webpage and thinking about, “How can I use my skills to interact with the world?” and not just for banking applications and things at social media sites, but to interact with the world with their existing skills and break out of the screen to explore and invent.
TG: My students are builders. They get their hands dirty. After graduation, they hang lights for concerts, live in construction shops and build physical things. I think the people who end up having longevity in the industry that I teach in are the ones who understand the connection of what they are building to a bigger picture. I think this project has been huge for the students. I’ve told them every single day that this project and what they are building are going to live far beyond them graduating from this program. We hope that the project will then travel to other campuses. They’re excited for other students and other programs to see their creative work and understand that there’s a connection between what they build and other people’s experiences. I think it’s hugely important for my students to understand the interconnectivity between what they build and what people’s experiences are.
RB: The interconnectivity is a great thing for impact. We started to have conversations with campuses in other countries, “How could you contribute to this project, and how could you almost have a satellite location?” We’ve talked to people in Denmark, and it was like, “How could we have a live escape room experience going on between people in Denmark and Canada at the same time?” I think that’s another great project to chase after. With a project that’s so large and interconnected, you realize that you can’t do everything by yourself, and that can be a bit hard because sometimes people want to control everything. With this project, there are so many variables, and you need to have trust in other people. Being able to rely on other people and building out your network are skills that are learned. With this project, you can start to see, “I can take those skills, and I can use them to build, say, a puzzle or things like that.” We did user testing with some students from our Bachelor of Design User Experience Program, and that was one of the things we had to prime them on when we were testing puzzles. It’s different than testing a website. It’s okay if people don’t solve the puzzle. We wanted to learn that, and sometimes the puzzles [will be] a bit harder, and that’s okay, too. I think those are some good things to uncover as well.
Escape Humber—Innovation in Action
As our conversation wrapped, one thing became clear: Escape Humber isn’t just about learning to solve puzzles—it’s about building the mindset to work across differences, solve collaboratively, and trust the process of creative risk-taking. This is innovation in action—rooted in the values of polytechnic education and brought to life through intentional design. As Sean Doyle stated, the escape room gives students the opportunity to “interact with the world with their existing skills and break out of the screen to explore and invent.”