I experienced my first escape room a couple of years ago while in Toronto, Canada for work… it was a team building event. I totally had a blast figuring out the puzzles and unlocking the next puzzle. It’s all very cerebral, and heart pounding at the same time as you watch the clock tick down to zero.
For those of you who have never experienced and escape room, it concept is pretty simple. You and your team are locked in a room and presented with a series of clues and puzzles. As you complete the puzzles they lead to more puzzles, or parts of the total solution until finally you gather all the content needed, and “escape” the room. You generally have 1 hour to complete the challenge. If you’ve never done one, I highly recommend it… find one here.
Fast forward to early May of 2019 and you will find me in Columbus, Ohio attending and speaking at the Columbus Tableau User Group. After the event, we were standing around talking and someone mentioned an escape room that someone had built in Tableau! A quick search led me to the Tableau Public Profile of WSSU Institutional Assessment & Research.
After playing with their Escape Room for a minute, I decided that I wanted to build one of my own, using the good old Superstore dataset. The aim being the same as WSSU’s ; part training, part engagement, and part gamification of the whole process. Gamification is a great way to engage someone on a learning path as I have found through the quizzes I use in the Desktop Bootcamp class I teach at work, so to me, this was an awesome way to get people who consume data in Tableau to learn how to explore the data.
The first thing I needed to do is decide on the features of a Tableau dashboard I would want users to have to use to answer a set of questions. What I settled on was:
- Quick Filters
- Action Filters
- Parameters
- Tooltips
- Multi-Select (Drag-to-Select)
Once I had those, I decided that to escape my room totally, you’d need to collect 4 “passwords” so my next task was to start to construct vizzes that I could use in my “rooms”. Each room would have 4 questions to answer, and each question would have a parameter with options to answer the questions with.
I then started to play with my vizzes to come up with the questions and answers, using wrong combinations of filters and selection to come up with the incorrect answers to make it not so obvious as to which one was correct… they had to work at it!
The structure of the Answer Parameters went as follows.
- Select and Answer! had a value of Zero
- Incorrect answers had a value of 1, 2, or 3
- Correct answers had a value of 99
The reason for this was so that I could easily identify when they had the correct answer; a total of the parameters equal to 396 meant the answered all the questions correctly and the password appears. A total of the parameters less than 3 return a response of “Answer all the question” and a total of less that or equal to 396 returns a response of “That’s not quite right”
Once all 4 passwords are achieved, they can return to the first page and input the 4 passwords and ESCAPE! If the words are correct, I return a congratulatory message, otherwise, they get a negative response. To achieve this, I simply added a filter on two worksheets with a Yes/No, and did a sheet swap based on the Final Key.
To build my Final Key, I concatenated the four answer parameters together, and did and UPPER() in the event someone did mixed case and compared it against the correct answer.
I’ve got a few enhancements I want to make for a 2nd version which I’ll add in the near future. Any feedback or ideas on the Escape Room are welcome, and if you find something that doesn’t seem right, please let me know!
To try and escape, click here!