Some of the best ID education at IDWeek happens behind a locked door. Out-BREAK!, the conference’s educational escape room, drops teams of IDWeek attendees into a themed room that they can escape only by solving a series of ID-themed puzzles and games. Since its 2023 debut in Boston, it has become one of the meeting’s most popular draws. In its first year, sign-ups filled within 15 minutes of opening each day.
ID Connect physician Diana Zhong, MD, MHS, is one of the room’s founders, has designed puzzles for every edition of the room, and is co-first author of the 2024 Open Forum Infectious Diseases paper that evaluated the room and discussed its educational aspects. This year in Washington, D.C., Out-BREAK! takes players on a microscopic journey inside the host.
Built by ID clinicians, for ID clinicians
Out-BREAK! began in 2023 with a core group of 10 clinicians with backgrounds in education, games, and puzzles. The group has since grown to roughly 30, mostly adult and pediatric ID physicians and ID pharmacists.
Dr. Zhong fills the role the team calls “puzzle architect.” She built several puzzles for the inaugural room, helped lead the puzzle committee, and co-led the creative design committee for IDWeek 2024 in Los Angeles. During IDWeek, she joins test play to streamline puzzles and works live sessions as an in-room moderator, giving clues or nudges when appropriate. She brings a background in art, design, and board game design to the work.
Where the learning meets the game
Each puzzle starts with a learning objective, followed by a game mechanic chosen to reinforce it.
In the 2023 room, players read clinical cases, then placed antibiotic disk diffusion magnets on Petri dishes of magnetic sand “bacteria” (bacterial colonies), matching each drug to the right organism to reveal a clue. At its core, Dr. Zhong said, the puzzle was a multiple-choice question made hands-on and fun.
Getting the difficulty right takes several rounds of iteration and test runs. Each puzzle moves through brainstorming, test play with learner groups, and live on-site test plays on IDWeek’s preliminary day. Planning for the next room begins soon after each IDWeek ends. For Dr. Zhong, the payoff is watching players have “light bulb moments” when a puzzle clicks.
The case for ID-themed escape rooms
The OFID paper found that 95% of surveyed participants rated the 2023 IDWeek escape room a valuable teaching method, even though only 35% had ever tried game-based learning at their home institution. The response exceeded what the team expected. “I was blown away by the extent of the positive reception,” Dr. Zhong said.
Trainees also made up 37% of surveyed players, compared with 22% of overall IDWeek attendees, suggesting escape rooms could help draw future ID physicians, a small but real lever against the growing ID workforce shortage.
On a smaller scale, Dr. Zhong built an ID-themed escape room for University of Pittsburgh medical students during a specialty elective week, giving those still weighing their options a hands-on taste of ID. With the ability to adjust the difficulty of the content and provide in-room guidance, she believes rooms like this could be used to teach and engage residents and even pre-med undergraduates.
What’s next
This year’s “inside the host” theme draws on classics like The Magic School Bus, Osmosis Jones, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. “It’s meant to be immersive, silly, and kind of campy,” Dr. Zhong said.
Her advice for first-time teams: talk out loud, narrate what you find, and work together. Above all, stay curious and don’t dismiss anything you find in the room. For educators interested in building a room on a tight budget, she favors simple mechanics. A matching or multi-select puzzle needs nothing more than printed words and pictures.
Looking ahead, Dr. Zhong and the Out-BREAK! team will keep building new themes and ID topics for the IDWeek escape room each year, giving returning and first-time players fresh ways to explore the field. She’s also revamping her University of Pittsburgh escape room for future students.
ID is a specialty built on curiosity, and an escape room rewards exactly that. “Watching people walk out of the room excited about ID, that’s one of the best parts,” Dr. Zhong said.
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