Let's Learn Algorithms with AlgoTutorBot! An Entire Course as an Educational Escape Room

ABSTRACTDuring the Spring 2021 semester, stuck in quarantine due to the ongoing global pandemic, I decided I needed to do something completely different with my undergraduate-level Algorithms course. Tired of teaching via Zoom to little boxes, I recreated the entire course, inspired by my love of Escape Rooms and Alternate Reality Games. Connecting Canvas, Ohyay, and GradeScope with my own custom technology, I weaved a zany, video-based narrative whereby students would inevitably have to save me from my own Frankenstein's monster: an evil Intelligent Tutoring System named "AlgoTutorBot" who threatens not only the course, but the entire world! The learning experience incorporates a range of engaging assignments, available to external adopters. This includes not only programming problems and conventional algorithmic logic problems, but also a novel web application for experimenting with runtime analysis, an interactive point-and-click adventure for practicing graph algorithms, and an assignment framework for concretizing students' problem-solving process into tangible artifacts. There are also smaller assignments that would be easily adopted into a regular Algorithms course. This demo will show off the final version of the course and describe the lessons learned along the way. All resources and a walkthrough video of the experience are available at https://acbart.github.io/algotutorbot/