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April 8th, 2026
Students of Michael Witt recently collaborated with public safety leader and Purdue alumna Amy Hess to design and build an investigative-themed escape room as part of the Executive in Residence (EiR) program. The EiR program—part of Residential Academic Initiatives within University Residences—brings distinguished alumni back to live on campus and mentor students, participate in classroom discussions, and share insights from their careers.
Director Hess graduated from Purdue in 1989 and worked for 29 years in various roles for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), from special agent to executive assistant director, including the investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing and capture of Timothy McVeigh in 1995. She is currently the executive director of homeland security for the state of Kentucky.
Witt, a professor in Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies, works with many of the visiting executives to create experiential education opportunities for the students in the Engineering in the World of Data Learning Community, such as last month’s escape room.
In her consultation with Witt and his students, Hess presented four types of cases that she worked on in her career that might be suitable for an escape room: robbery, domestic terrorism, ransomware attacks, and kidnapping.
What scenario did the students choose for their escape room?
Purdue Pete and the men’s basketball coach, Matt Painter, have been kidnapped! Much of the team’s recent success on the court could be attributed to the development of PeteGPT—an artificial intelligence tool that can predict what plays an opposing team will run in a game. A ransom note demands the source code to PeteGPT or else the kidnappers will compel Painter to switch teams and coach for rival Indiana University. The consequences for Purdue Pete are unclear but equally ominous.
Following the engineering design process
The students elected a team leader and proceeded to apply the engineering design process to the challenge: defining the problem, brainstorming different designs, selecting a design to develop into a prototype, and then iterating to evaluate and optimize it. In the course of doing research for the project, the team visited Mission: Breakout Lafayette and played two of their escape rooms to gather ideas and work together from a shared experience. They were also able to interview the owner and game room designer, Eric Simons, and to continue to consult with Hess as they developed the storyline and design for their escape room.
“It was energizing,” Hess said about the collaboration. “It was so fun to watch them put together puzzles that other people could solve.”
Students took the initial concept and developed it into a fully immersive experience, incorporating clues, red herrings, and misleading leads to mirror the complexity of real investigations. Hess noted that solving investigative puzzles rarely happens quickly or easily, making the students’ thoughtful design and attention to detail especially impressive.
Although Hess provided guidance and shared insights from her career, she emphasized that the students did the hard work of designing the narrative, building the puzzles, and bringing the escape room to life. For her, the most rewarding part of the experience was seeing how the students transformed a simple investigative scenario into a complex and engaging challenge.
Staff from University Residences and Libraries and School of Information Studies participated in a playtest of the team’s prototype before the escape room opened for two days for other students in the learning community to play.
It’s not all fun and games
The experience was “more fun than a barrel of monkeys,” said Witt, “but it’s important to emphasize the pedagogy behind the fun we were having.” He outlined and incorporated learning objectives for both the design team and the students who played the escape room. “My students took ownership of the project and made all of the important decisions in the process. They started with eight different ideas and narrowed it down to one that they developed and successfully implemented.”
The escape room project is one example of experiential education and a growing movement at Purdue to enable students to gain knowledge and skills through direct experience, the application of theory to practice, and reflection. Residential Academic Initiatives and EiR Director Bryan Austin explains, “While it’s fun on the surface, this kind of experiential learning helps students connect what they’re learning with the real-world insights and experiences of our visiting executives.”
Learning objectives for the design team:
Learning objectives for players: