‘Dr. Hardass’ teaches CSC 800 and provides the toughest final exam. In order to pass, students must find clues around the classroom to unlock his briefcase, which holds the answer key.
So went the Computing Club Collaborative’s recent escape room. The theme: “Escape the Final.”
From two simultaneously running escape rooms to plans for a carnival featuring bouncy houses, the collaborative (CCC) aims to bring Cal Poly’s computer science clubs together with fun at top of mind. The goal is to bridge the distance between the multitude of organizations, according to co-executive director of Cal Poly Hack4Impact Khoa Ly.
Escape the Final was held in the computer science labs of Frank E. Pilling (Bldg 14), where two classrooms held the dreaded final by ‘Dr. Hardass,’ played by computer science junior Jonathon Hildred. Everything had its place in the rooms, where sticky notes, paper clocks, backpacks, water bottles and locks were set up to impersonate a real final exam for the students. Once a 25 minute timer was set, the escape rooms erupted in frantic searches for clues, keys and a way to leave the classroom.
The collaborative is made up of leaders from their respective computing clubs, described by Ly as a “United Nations kind of situation.” Computer science sophomore Hannah Moshtaghi, president of Cal Poly CS+AI club, co-founded the CCC with Ly in fall of 2023 and worked to create an escape room that would let students relax and enjoy themselves during midterm season.
71 students took part in the escape room, each in teams of around six people, collaborating and working against the clock to use the clues around them to unlock four locks from the backpacks to reach ‘Dr. Hardass’s’ briefcase to fill out the tough final using the answer key.
Before every room, the students were briefed by a video of ‘Dr. Hardass’ explaining his difficult final exam, wishing them luck, “not that luck will save your deplorable academic careers,” providing a chuckle between the students.
The collaborative spent weeks designing and building two simultaneous versions of the same escape room, with $1,200 in funding from the Noyce School of Applied Computing. The money was split between food for the participants and mechanical keyboards as prizes for the team with the lowest time escaping, according to Moshtaghi.
Sindhu Srivats, President of Cal Poly’s Women Involved in Software and Hardware club, recalls working late with the collaborative to build clues that were competitive in nature.
“How can you escape with all the clues that students have left behind? How can you look around the room and figure out, okay, what is every single thing that I need to mentally catalog and just remember to try to escape?” Srivats said. “Everything is going to be positioned in a way where it reveals information.”
Eight computing clubs are currently active in the collaborative, which include CS+AI, Hack4Impact, Women Involved in Hard and Software, Cal Poly Security Club, Color Coded, Cal Poly Game Development, Computer Engineering Society and Google Developer Student Clubs.
According to Ly, the issue of gender and race disparity within computer science as a major are a “consequence of the field,” and are often the reason why these clubs are formed. In 2023, the College of Engineering awarded 1,554 degrees, with 72.65% male graduates, and 72.16% of those male graduates being white, according to Cal Poly Institutional Research.
“For a long time, I felt like ‘I wish I knew more about what the other clubs were doing,’” Ly said. “There are so many different and unique computing clubs and we’re all isolated in our own territories, our own communities, that I thought it would be a good chance to build a [computer science] community.”
Starting off with a trivia night in fall quarter with more than 100 attendees, the escape room was the collaborative’s second event used to bring the students together through fun challenges, according to Moshtaghi.
During the escape room, multiple teams would ‘pick,’ or guess the lock combinations to reveal more clues, causing the student proctors to be on alert. Some groups would silently and calmly work at gathering the clues and puzzles, while next door, shouting and screams could be heard through the walls.
Chaos would often erupt throughout the night, with a reset team rushing in the second a group would exit the rooms, placing the locks back together and ensuring nothing was broken.
The winning team escaped the final at 12 minutes and 44 seconds, bragging as they exited the room and snapped a photo in front of a decorated whiteboard. Cries of “Where’s ‘Dr. Hardass?’ I need to gloat!” brought the faux CSC 800 class to life.
The collaborative are considering hosting a carnival in the coming months where students can meet and network with professors, according to Moshtaghi.
The CCC is searching for other computing clubs on campus to get involved in the collaborative and encourages students to join their events. To get involved, email Hannah Moshtaghi at hmoshtag@calpoly.edu.