Kainos launches high-stakes escape room for teens at NI Science Festival!

Date posted
22 January 2020
Reading time
5 Minutes

Kainos launches high-stakes escape room for teens at NI Science Festival!

The NI Science festival returns February for 10 days with an exciting escape room event developed by Kainos, a festival partner and leading provider of digital services and platforms.

Engineers and experience designers from Kainos have built an interactive experience, 'Kainos Lockdown' to intrigue and excite students aged 14-18 to give them a real insight into coding and problem solving.

Kainos Lockdown is inspired by the ever-increasing popularity of escape rooms and the key to its success is making it open and accessible to young people with little or no experience of coding or tech, while also giving an introduction to complex themes such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber security.

Hosted at the Crescent Arts Centre, students will be given 30 minutes to restore the fictional Kainos Defence & Encryption Network, or KAIDEN for short, which has been taken offline by an unknown source. It's a high stakes, high pressure adventure - work together as a team to crack the codes to get KAIDEN'S AI systems operational again, before hackers cause an entire system meltdown.

This involves getting the computer online, finding and processing the data, picking and training a machine learning model and using the model to detect the security threat. Students also get to explore a world in Virtual Reality, and are challenged to apply mathematical principles. It's only once the team has escaped, that the Kainos will share some of the secrets behind the experience.

Kainos Lockdown has been developed as part of the Kainos Academy and is just one example of how the company is continually innovating to develop learning experiences that spark interest in the incredible careers in tech. Kainos Academy is the engine that drives continuous career development, and includes programmes such as Earn As You Learn, and the company's Placement and Graduate Schemes. Traditionally, Academy initiatives such as CodeCamp and A.I.Camp have helped to stimulate interest in careers in tech at school and student level. Innovative new experiences like this will help attract an even broader audience.

Kainos CTO, Tom Gray, explains: 'Being a Science Festival partner gives us the chance to reach a whole new audience, and to excite young people about tech, and how getting to grips with that tech can open up opportunities in their future. Our team is expert in this area and we have designed and developed many initiatives that have introduced and inspired young people to explore how they can take part in changing the world for the better with technology.'

Kainos Lockdown is a FREE NI Science Festival event and takes place at the Crescent Arts Centre on Monday 17th and Tuesday 18th February. Sessions are on the hour, from 1:00 - 5:00pm on the 17th and 10:00am - 4:00pm on the 18th..Get a team together and book your place.