The University of Alicante Campus Transforms into a Mathematics 'Escape Room'

Mathematics inundates the campus of the University of Alicante. Formulas often go unnoticed in the daily lives of those who stroll through its paths. However, 12 and 13-year-old students from the Estalmat programme will uncover all its hidden secrets in a unique 'escape room'.

Tessellations, columns, cylindrical towers, curved arches, or various shapes like rectangles or hexagons flood the campus. This is the case with the University of Alicante Museum (MUA), an imposing orthogonal prism, or semicircular shapes, semi-ellipses, circular crowns, or bleachers with concentric rows can be recognized in the Poets' Corner and Lecture Hall II.

These aspects are reflected in the everyday world of science and will be revealed this Saturday, February 8, during the treasure hunt organized by the Mathematics Dissemination Group of the UA (Dimates).

Thus, students from the Mathematics Talent Stimulation programme of the Community will experience a scientific adventure in a playful, educational, and participatory manner. They will also appreciate how terms from the Fibonacci sequence are found in nature, exemplified by the spiral rows of scales on pine cones.

Participants, divided into groups, will pass through different stations where a monitor will provide them with an educational sheet with tasks directly linked to the mathematical element or structure related to the stop. After evaluating the activities and achieving a minimum score, the young participants will access an encrypted key that will give them the clue to find the next location and complete the route.

The students, who will start the activity at 10 a.m., will explore a significant part of the campus, taking the following stops as reference points for activities: Lecture Hall I (meeting point), Poets' Corner, University of Alicante Museum (MUA), and the parking lot near Social Club I.

Additionally, within the Estalmat programme of the Valencian Community, members of the Dimates group are conducting other educational activities. Roberto Selva, a teacher at the Miguel Hernández Secondary School in Alicante, leads the 'Strategy Games' activity, and Juan Matías Sepulcre, a professor from the UA Mathematics Department, conducts the 'Elementary Inequalities I and II' workshop.

In these sessions, a wide variety of mathematical problems of varying difficulty, related to optimization and geometry. are addressed. To this end, they use basic concepts and results linked to the use of some classical inequalities (such as the arithmetic-geometric or Cauchy-Schwarz) and present specific mathematical approaches as strategies to adequately tackle the resolution of the problems posed in each activity.