CheMystery
Chemistry plays a crucial role in overcoming global challenges such as climate change and offers solutions for a sustainable future. CheMystery brings together scientific expertise with creative approaches from school, extracurricular learning spaces and escape game design to enable young people to discover chemical phenomena and turn green chemistry into modular, mobile playful escape-puzzles. Our aim is to create personal involvement and an awareness of the everyday relevance of chemistry, and to inspire girls and young women in particular for STEM fields.
In a working group at Neues Gymnasium Bochum, students develop customised experiments on the topic of green and sustainable chemistry based on their everyday lives. Afterwards they build puzzles from those ideas at Think2. In this way, they not only learn how to use laboratory equipment such as Liebig coolers and burettes, but also the latest manufacturing tools such as laser cutting, 3D printing, soldering, paint guns and programming microcontrollers to make the puzzles exciting and diverse.
In the premises of the youth organisation Die Falken Bochum, the puzzles are tested with educationally disadvantaged children and young people. Together we investigate the effect on motivation, interest and knowledge and use the feedback to further improve the games.
But our goal is not only to develop great games - we want to create a STEM cluster in the rural area that enables schools and other educational institutions to realise such projects themselves and to work together with the chemical industry and student laboratories to encourage creativity and chemical thinking.
