The Fall 2025 Living Lab Team

Our first week in the Lab, some of us nervous, some of us excitedly planning our graduation within 16 weeks. As we venture into the nerd palace in the basement of the Engineering and Technology Building, we are greeted with a young, goofy and inspirational mentor ready to lead us through project definition, layout, design, and launch. Professor Hampton immediately allows our creativity to take root from the moment we walk in, stating that we will be choosing our projects to go after, our problems in our community that we can fix. Questioning us for once about what we would like to work on, rather than questioning how we did not follow the guidelines to the correct solution.

For the first time in our collegiate career we are working on projects that are based on the knowledge and skills we have built through Purdue and utilizing these skills to address challenges in our everyday lives. Many of us scrambled to come up with an original idea to go after, but finally we realized that building an interactive Escape Room would be immensely educational and fun for students trying to enhance their skills in Networking, Data Management, Web Design and Cyber Security. Professor Hampton also handed us the task of completing the Living Lab Website to garner more support and recognition of what this course has to offer.

As we settled into what the course would be about and how to attack the projects that we will now be spending a full semester on, we begin to introduce ourselves around the room to build more collaborative efforts between the projects. We begin designing flows of what would be best for each concentration to focus on before reconvening to move to the next phase of the project. As we split into our concentration groups we begin patching portions of the project together with wireframes and design flow sheets. The Security Team begins troubleshooting PC’s for usage in the Escape Room Project to create a physical form of the escape room. The Networking Team begins assessing equipment within the room to be utilized for the project, as well as creating their own necessary physical escape room tasks. The Web Developer Team begins working on the Living Lab Website Project to allow for parts of the Escape Room Project to form.

Researching ideas and finding solutions to new technologies finishes out a full workday of emotions as we turn from nervousness to ambitiousness in our projects to finish out our degrees.