 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns. Hi. Krista Burns Porter. I got to remember to say that. For those of you who may not know, I got married a couple weeks ago and I'm still getting used to it. Congratulations. Thank you. Soon there'll be name changes more official coming through. It's a work in progress. But I am the host here of the Nebraska Library Commission's Encompass Live. We are a weekly online show here broadcast out of Nebraska. We're a webinar, a webcast, an online show. Whatever you want to call us, we are here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. However, if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We record the show every week and we post it on our website afterwards so you can always go there and see the recordings of all of our previous shows. We have them going all the way back to when we first started in January 2009. All our recordings are there. They're posted to the Nebraska Library Commission's YouTube channel publicly. So you can go there and see anything we have. We also include in our recording pages any presentations people have like we have one today at PowerPoint, any handouts, and links to anything that any websites have been mentioned that were of importance during the show. So you have everything you need there. So please do take a look at our archives and I'll show you that at the end of the show as well where those all are. That you can go and watch all of them and I think everything works on those old even though the old ones we've converted everything. As I said, we do the show live every Wednesday morning 10 a.m. Central Time. We do a mixture of things here, book reviews, mini training sessions, interviews, mini demos. You only have an hour so nothing too complex. Basically anything library related is the only criteria we have here. So it's something happening in a library, new programs, new services, or something that we think might be useful to libraries. Some of you might think it'll outside the box and you don't wonder why is this on the show. Stick with us, you know, trust us. It all comes around to libraries in some way. The show is free and open to anyone to watch. So either our live show or our archives, please do share with any of your friends, colleagues, neighbors, family, anyone who might be interested in anything. They are welcome to log into our live show or watch the recordings or post it up there later. Excuse me. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on the show sometimes to do presentations, things that are services or programs that we're offering or doing through the commission. But we also bring in guest speakers sometimes. And that's what we have this morning. To my left is Rasmus Thogerson. He is from Morton James Public Library, which is in Nebraska City, a little southeast of here. Yeah. Yeah, east of here or south of Omaha. Yeah. And he is currently the library director there for just until the end of the year. Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. Okay. He's moving on to a new position, but he's still with us for now, which is great. And what they've done at their library is you may have heard of these escape rooms, and I'm sure we're going to explain a little more about that if you're not sure. We actually have, I think at least two of them here in Lincoln. Yeah, they kind of become really popular all the time. Yeah. And they've got one at their library, which I think is the first time I've heard of a library-based one, maybe. That was the idea behind it, at least. So he's going to tell us how they came up with it, how it got started. And actually, I think one of the coolest part about it is how the kids, the teams in the library were involved in the process. So I'll just hand over to you to take it away. Sure. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me, Krista. Well, yes. So I call this presentation Library Lockdown, How to Build an Escape Room in your Library. And I tend to ramble. So stop me if I do. And it might not be super structured. We'll see what happens. Aside from my presentation, I want to point out that I also brought a mini escape room today. So if we will get to that, hopefully at some point. We're not locked in here. Am I locked in here? I can't get out until I... I got someone to lock the door here, so now we're stuck in the room. No, in this, actually, what we're getting, we're trying to get me, because I see you have a tasty beverage. Mine is locked in this box. So I need people, either you or the people watching to unlock this at some point. We'll get to that later. It's just sort of an interactive element I brought. We don't have to, we don't have time for them. This is also to show how it's easy to make these things on a much smaller scale than what we did at our library. Right. So you can take it on the road somewhere. Yeah, and just sort of a lot of what I think people should be interested in or would be interested in is how to do this, again, on a scale, on a shoe string project on a smaller scale. It was kind of a large project for us, considering the size of our library. I'll get started on some of the background here. So last year we applied for what's called the Curiosity Creates Grant, which is a grant that is done by American Library Association in Disney. And it was, so we awarded $7,500 to do this project, which was to build an escape room in our library with the help of kids. So we were one of 79 public libraries across the United States that got this grant. And so we were, when we got the money, we sort of had the whole spring to make this project that we came up with happen. And then we were sort of valuated on it and it was, so that's the basic thing. It's called Curiosity Creates. It was really good grant for us, I think. And the idea behind the grant came out of a white paper. I linked it in the presentation, as you can see here, inspiring a generation to create critical components of creativity in children. So the white papers sort of discuss how you can make children more creative, how they can enjoy being creative. And so this particular grant was to see how we can use the things in that white paper in the library to do programming or whatnot. So the URL might be a little faded out. I see that now on the big screen there, at least. That's okay. We'll include the links afterwards. It should be very clickable and it'll take you straight to the white paper. If not, you should be able to find it as librarians out there. I do have the title and author, so you should be able to find it. So that was sort of the background for it. We were very lucky to get this grant, which allowed us to experiment. So we were one of these, quite a few other libraries across the United States that sort of got to play around with something that you normally, you might not have the budget to do, because we sort of, some of the things we had to buy were a little outside of what we normally would spend money doing, but it was really fun to be able to sort of play around and just experiment and invent things as we went along. So that was a curiosity. It creates grants and I do hope they come by. I don't know if they're going to have a new one this year. Keep an eye out on, you know, the solicitors and the ALSC. Is this a regular grant or was it just kind of a one? I'm not sure what they, I mean, last time I heard they weren't sure what was going to happen with it, but keep an eye out on ALSC and then sure simple things will pop up eventually. Yeah, it looks like they've gotten from right now on the website through ALA and ALSC. It's got information about the current grants and what was going on. So yeah, so there's a, if you go on the website, there'll be a bunch of reports and things like that. I'll have some links to it at the end of my presentation as well. And there, so as I put in the presentation, there were some admins from ALSC and then you also haven't had an external evaluate who made a final report. So that's also available as, and the final report also sort of explains a lot of the different programs, because we were just one out of many, and there are a lot of really cool ones out there. So if you're looking for inspiration for something to do in your library, I would recommend checking it out. Yeah, because they listed a lot in here. They said there were over 400 applications received, and they only gave out 79 grants. So yeah. But they've got them all listed here, and they're putting up information about them. So yeah, just, it's very easy to find online, and I would recommend saying, if you're sort of looking for something to do in your library, it's going to be creativity and children, go check and look at it. It was really great for us. So now I'm just going to tell you our process, what sort of happened. And so the first one is a mess. So basically. Looks familiar. Well, so what this is, is something that might not be completely unknown to some libraries at least. This is sort of, this used to be the old children's library at the Morning James Public Library. And then we had a wonderful edition build in 2002, which meant that we sort of had this space sort of sitting there. And it became a storage area. And then over time, things accumulated in there. So part of the reason for even wanting to do anything with this space was basically to clean up this room and make it sort of available to the public. Because the room is actually pretty cool. It's sort of hidden away under the library. But we sort of felt that something could be done with it. So that was sort of step one, just figuring out, OK, when I wrote the grant, part of the original idea came from just wanting to do something with that room, repurposing it somehow. So it sort of could be useful for the community. Because it's always the area how it can be useful for the librarians working there. But sometimes it's a great room. And we didn't need to store all those things in there. That's at least how I felt. So that was sort of a mess. It looks more messy. I mean, it was sort of organized. But nonetheless, it's a lot of things in a small space. We also had some water damage in there. And it was a little bit musty. So there was a main reason for the cleaning up and airing out the room and whatnot. So that was sort of the background. And then as you mentioned, the escape rooms, we have Cyril and Lincoln already. And I know there are some in Omaha. There's a really good one down in Kansas City as well. And they're all over the place. Cyril thousands, I think, across the United States. So that was sort of the idea. And then, but not just to build an escape room for kids to come into. The idea was to have the kids build an escape room. And that was sort of where that made our idea novel, I think. It's not necessarily just to have somewhere where they can come in and solve puzzles. Actually, the room as it is now isn't just meant for kids. It's pretty hot. I wouldn't necessarily recommend just sending three or four kids in there. They wouldn't be able to make it out. So it's actually- They need an adult to sort of help them out. Usually, I would recommend a healthy mix of children and also sort of play the room. But it was made by kids. That was the whole point. Having them come in and sort of have an ongoing project in the library where they made something out of it. So this was sort of the previous stuff. So this is step number two. This is another mess. So this is mid-process, so to speak. This is when we had all the stuff cleaned out of the room. And this is so that the room itself and other places in the library became sort of- I wouldn't necessarily call it miniature mega spaces, but they became work areas where the kids came in and filled these puzzles and worked on puzzles and solved puzzles and worked on them. So we like to say something like, one of our taglines was a mega space in which you make a space because they sort of come in and they make something. So what was different about this mess than other craft-oriented messes we had in the library was probably this one was the first one that was ongoing. Oftentimes when we have crafts at the Modern James Public Library it's one of things, like next week we're going to have a mermaid party, we have an exhibit with the sea creatures. So we're going to have the kids come in and they can do mermaid related crafts, which is great. But it's a one-off thing related to a specific topic or it's a Christmas thing or it's a Halloween thing, you know, those things. But this was more of having a group of kids coming in every Saturday, actually for four months and continually working on it. That has some challenges, but that was the idea to have a co-group of children working on these puzzles. But you can't just come in one day and make a bunch of puzzles. You have to think about it a lot. And it has to make sense for the kids doing it and it also has to make sense from a gameplay perspective on the other side of it. So it takes a lot of coordination and it takes a lot of time. But anyway, so I was sure a lot of it is trial and error too. I mean, playing through and seeing if it works or not. I don't have to come up with something new. I mean, there's a lot of things to consider. I'll get back to some of the gameplay elements a little later, I think. But as you mentioned, you have trial and error and you also have to figure out a way to make sure that it works in the confines of having a game that's supposed to last an hour. You have like an hour of gameplay. So the puzzle, it's like a video game. That's how I usually explain it to the kids that were there. It's not fun if it's too easy. It's not fun if it's too hot either. So it's defining that gameplay balance between things in a puzzle. So that was part of the challenge. But with all those challenges, even with thinking about all those, then we come to the next one, which is profit. So this is our final step, right, profit. So this is on our opening night. We had, we're very fortunate in Nebraska City to have a lot of support from the community. And so we had, this is the mayor and his family. I saw an article about them that they tried to know. Right after I got the grant, I asked the mayor if I could lock them in a room for an hour. And he just looked at me like I was sort of crazy, but he does that a lot, but he played along. He's really, really nice guy. So the point was to have like a big opening night for the community where we would lock the mayor and his family in there and see if they could make it out. And so we made a party out of it. And we had all the kids that were, we had somewhere between, we had 15 to 20 call children coming in and it sort of fluctuates because sometimes they have sports, they have events going on, you know. But we had someone between, I think the least kids were like 12 maybe and then up to 35. 35 was, that was a crazy day. That was in the beginning. You had some, sometimes some of them, they stopped coming and then some of them bringing friends or siblings, you know, but we had a core group that kept coming. So this was the profit stage. This is when we were completely done with it. And we could have this big opening house. So we had an open house with the kids and all the families. We had a hundred people in the building just having like a party, having some pizza while the mayor and his family was trying to say the world. And so say the world from the zombie apocalypse, which ended up being the theme for this room. So it turned out really well. And now what we have is we have the escape room in the basement of a library in that room. And in the community or anyone really can come in and use it for free. We do accept free will donations, but we don't require it. So you can come in and you can sort of play in the room for an hour and have a good time. And we, like last week, I had three groups going through and this week we have one tomorrow. So we still have people interested in it. Well, let's not hear about it. Yeah. I had a lot of, you know, word of mouth as well. People are asking about it. I think in terms of marketing, something like the mayor coming in and that big opening, that helped a lot. Right. So that really got the word out there. And also the fact that we had our room ended up being like a zombie themed room. So we shot a zombie movie during that and that also got some press and some interest in it. So that was fortunate for us. I want to think I would recommend, if you're actually building an entire room, I would give a date when it's getting dismantled because I had the feeling that all people in the Brass City, they just asked sort of, they assume it's going to be there forever. So they don't feel the urgency of actually booking the room. So we had more now than we had in the opening weeks because people were just more interested now, honestly. Halloween's coming up. They might be looking for something like that. You know, I guess as the word sort of spreads a little bit. So I was expecting a lot more people in the beginning, but it's all just been a steady stream of people. No, and it's a lot of fun and it's something else to have in there, you know. So that's- Does it have, and you might get into this later too, is there much, like if someone's already gone through, is there much replayability? I mean, once you've done it, you know the answers. Yeah. I think if you want to play it several times, so the way these things work is that you shouldn't all work on every puzzle. So if you technically want to play it again, you could come in for people and you have to agree on working on separate puzzles, but no, it's a one-off deal. I mean, because we don't, again, we don't have time to be building. As far as doing it, this kind of extensive, I'd say, is a fairly time-consuming process, so this will take a long time. Because I know some of the, I think the one here in Lincoln has multiple versions of it, and they're also a more complex thing. It's like that's their business. Sure, yeah. That there's like a short version or a longer version, or there's different stories, different rooms you can do, different stories you want to do. At a library, of course, you wouldn't have that many options. And we also don't have- Yeah, we have the one room, and that's really what we have. And then, you know, what we also don't have is time to keep reinventing it, because there's actually a room in Nebraska City in ours world, and they change their puzzles ongoing. They change things up, but we don't really have the luxury of having people making money off this, even though I just had a slide saying profit. But so it's just, you know, it's a one-off thing, but I have had some people in where they took, like it was a teacher. She came in with her work, and then later on she brought her class in. So she was sort of still involved in it, but she wasn't actively helping out, so that could be fun on the other end. So this is the easy sort of saying, okay, this is sort of what happened in our room. So why did we do this? What's the whole purpose of all this? Well, I also already mentioned repurposing the library space, or figuring out something, some other way of using the space we have in the library. And then we also wanted to have this sense of ownership, another thing we have in our library that I really like, we have all these handprints in the children's library, where the kids, again, 2011, I think at least, they put their handprints up on the wall, then they sign their name and date it. And I like the way of sort of getting, taking ownership of the library. This is another way of doing it, because we had this old room, and I allowed them to paint on the walls, and I allowed them to break some things if it made the room more fun, and so to just create that sense of ownership. So that was a good reason for it. And then also for having this, another big part of it was the ongoing programming. I wanted to get done. I wanted to have an ongoing program, versus just having those one-off events. And then it was a good way for me to create some community engagement. Again, we had the mayor coming in, we had some hype around the zombie thing we had. In our zombie movie, we had the chief of police act in it. So it's a good way to get people involved in it, just know the library is there, and remind people that the library is very much a vibrant part of the community. So that was in the marketing, it was a reason to, just create something new and exciting, and sort of create hype around the library. And then another reason, I call it repeatability and modularity here, but it was trying to understand if this is even feasible. Because no one's done it before, as far as we can tell. Escaped rooms exist, but not built by children. So it was kind of an exploration of how much sense does this make to do, how feasible is it in a library, our size in any library really. So we learned a lot about what to do and what not to do, which is great. That's sort of what you wanted. That's how you do it. Yeah, trial and error, failure, and trying something different, yeah. We failed a lot. I mean, I had some things where I spent way too much prep time on something that no one cared about. Like I had this thing with a complete side note here, so at our first session, the kids had to solve puzzles, so sort of get into the feeling of it. The first session was just them solving puzzles, and I made magical fizzy fruit, which is basically dry ice and fruit. So you can eat like a grape and it's fizzy, which comes carbonated. It's a chemical drink and it's fun. So I spent way too much time getting dry ice and do all this thing, and no one really cared about it. They were just interested in the puzzles. So it was just one of those things where maybe you stopped focusing on something and spent hours doing this thing and no one cared. I cared about it and like one other person. So you just learned that. Don't do fizzy fruit, I guess. So and the final reason we really wanted to do it was this thing we call structure creativity, which is having kids come in and do something that is going towards something bigger than themselves and having sort of creating that framework or attempting to create a framework that sort of makes sense and moves them to an overarching goal. So we had the timeline we made. This is the ideal thing. So we had one month where we actually solved puzzles. So what that was is first we taught them how to solve puzzles and we built puzzles for them to solve. And we built some simple versions of an escape room in that room and sort of had them try to get out of it. So we had like a Christmas theme one. It was actually Christmas, but they didn't care. Christmas is fun. And so after the one month of actually making puzzles, then you have two months of solving puzzles. Then you have two months of making them where you sort of start building the room and then you have two weeks of testing at the end and then you're done. I mean, that didn't happen at all that way, but that was sort of the ideal version of how it's supposed to be, right? Because then zombies attacked. So what do I mean by zombies attacked? Well, let's go back to the other slide here. When you have, let's say 20 kids on average, and they come in every Saturday for an hour and a half. You need, it has to be more structured than I thought it was going to have to be. So it was very, it became very chaotic at times. Manage all that. Kids can be very chaotic. They get bored quickly and you have to make sure that things get done. So even though you have a timeline, it can be hard to stick to that. And then something happened. Put in extra buffer time and everything. Yeah, that's very important. I think to have not be afraid of, well, I think not to be afraid of menial tasks, because sometimes you have too many kids to adult ratio and then just have them do something that contributes to the larger thing without having them necessarily build something themselves. So a lot of it is that, I mean, if you look at an escape room, it has several components. So you have this puzzle making, you need to come up with puzzles. Then you have the storytelling element, which is the story behind the puzzle. Because you're not just trying to solve, you're not just trying to, we have about a minute or one here. We're not just trying to solve open three locks. We're trying to do, in this case, we're trying to get me an energy drink. You can come up with a better story than getting me an energy drink, I hope. This is just what we're doing today, but have some sort of the flavor. It's like when you play a board game, like we have gameplay elements in the components, but the other side of it is the flair. So it's like a horror game. When you think about the gameplay, why is the gameplay is, there are only so many types of gameplay, but the rest is sort of the flair and the story behind it. So that's, they all, as I've been making- Is that the story? It's just all the same thing over and over again. I mean, it's just, I mean, you can solve the same puzzle in 100 different stories, and it'll give you a different experience because it's part of a different story. And finally, so what the kids did, what it wasn't just to have, to make puzzles, it was also creating that story, that narrative around what they were doing. And then it was building props, because you have to sort of fill the room with stuff that makes it look like the story they are trying to tell. So in our case, it became a zombie attack. So the story is that I have something here called the Journal of Dr. Morton McBrains. We're from the Morton James Public Library. So there's a story of this doctor who is trying to create a cure for cancer, and he made zombies instead, and now they're loose in the Brass City and you are sort of stuck in this room. And the antidote, he locked the antidote in a safe in the room and you have one hour to find the antidote. And if you don't, then you turn it into a zombie yourself and then sort of everything ends, you know. What's one of you is a zombie? That's it. So yeah, that's then the world sort of ends, right? So by saying that zombies attack is partially the part of the chaos that comes with that is then we decided to make a movie. Because in the room, typically in the escape room, we have like let's say one hour to get out and you have a clock to sort of take it out. The idea sort of emerged to have a movie showing what went on outside the room. Oh, while you were in there trying to do this? Yeah, so you know zombies are sort of wandering around. And so I wouldn't necessarily recommend this part of it, but then suddenly now we had to shoot a zombie movie too. So aside from building an escape room, we also had to make a zombie movie, which ended up being a lot of fun, but suddenly we also had to do that. And we were really lucky because we, the local radio station B-103, they helped out with it. They had a camera guy who was great at editing as well. So he just volunteered to help out with it. So we got a lot of help. So that's a whole other project, making a movie. Yeah, I know. So that's sort of the case there. Script rating and everything. Suddenly it became a movie project within the project. So it was kind of, we had some busy weekends and we had some pretty amazing volunteers that helped out more than I could have. I mean, if I had known how much time it was, it ended up taking, I would never have asked anyone to. So help out. But I'm really glad we did it. It ended up well, it ended up really a lot of fun. So zombies attacked and everything become chaos, right? And the whole project was chaotic, but fun throughout the process really. So, but we did survive. So this is our opening night and you have what you see there, it's me doing a ribbon cutting with Nebraska City Tourism Commerce, the local Chamber of Commerce, and the mayor and all the kids that were involved in the project. So that was really good. And then we had that opening party and we had pizza and the mayor got out and he got, his family got out with, I think like less than five minutes left. And that's perfect. Because then you know it, because if they don't make it out, that's not a lot of fun. Because you want the mayor to say the city and the world, right? Otherwise, but you also don't want him to make it out in 10 minutes. Because then it's not. Because that's a gameplay balance. So we honestly had most of our groups in that less than 10 minutes. Sometimes they just don't make it out and then sorry, then you just die right in the war lands. But most of the time, they tend to make it out with approximately 10 minutes left. We do have a person in the room helping out a little bit if they're too stuck. So it's not completely left to your own devices. You can sort of get a little bit of help as you go along. So is that, someone did ask a question that about for creation of the program, did you have like an adult facilitator working with them? Or was it just pretty much the kids taking it all on? It was all, yeah. We were adult facilitators. So we had volunteers that were regular volunteers that came in. And we had a parent. I volunteered my wife to help out. And then we had a young couple who was great. They were sort of the regulars. And then we had other volunteers on and off coming and going. So it was a lot of, you know, trying to plan out ahead of time what each volunteer, because they weren't part of it during the week. So it was trying to plan out ahead of time what they were supposed to be doing today. Now you do this with so many kids. Right. So no, don't lead them to themselves. It just doesn't work that way. I thought it was going to be more hands-off, but it turned out to be, you really have to kind of guide them. They get off on tangents and things. They do. And you know, and they, most of the kids we had, they tend to want to make it really hard. They have this really elaborate scheme to how to make it impossible. And then you have to try to explain it over and over again that, hey, that's not really, imagine you were playing this as a video game or a board game. You also want to have someone, you want people to have a chance at least. So it's good to have that sort of balance. And if they're writing a story, they get, I say, when they're writing a story about it and sort of what they want to be in the room, they can have some pretty unrealistic expectations of trap doors and robots. Like they can actually move around, because that's a little beyond what you can do, even in a professional escape room. So I mean, that's completely impossible for a library to do. Well, it's not impossible, but for us it was with the resources we have. So, but we didn't make it out. And it was really a lot of fun. And I thought it was a really successful experience for us. So here's just how to survive, how we saw what I would recommend doing based on what I did and didn't do, I guess. But the most important thing is you have like puzzles. I mean, because if you don't, you can't just make a group of your staff. And now you do this. They can come, you can come and ask me how sort of, just set it up and I have a better plan for how to set it up now, I think. I would have a better idea of what it would take. But if you don't have volunteers or staff working with the kids and liking it, then it's just not a lot of fun. I mean, it goes to this night. It's kind of a standard thing to say, but it really isn't important. Otherwise, Liking doing puzzles and creating them is two different things. Yeah, it is. And you have to think about that. And you also have to think about that. That kids don't necessarily have to make, you can actually have kids that never have to make a puzzle, but then they have to like telling a story. We're trying to get a little bit of everything and that worked out well. But you have to sort of think about that. So you just need people that are motivated to work with them. Otherwise, it's not going to fly. And then we did spend a lot of time in the beginning marketing it to the schools to make sure that you get kids to show up. Because we didn't have any sense as a volunteer program. They're supposed to be there for four months. You don't actually know how many they're going to show up. They're not always going to show up. So no, I was really worried because we only had, I think six confirmations before our first session. And you know, so you just don't know. And that's, I think most people that have done programming knows this sort of feeling of, not going to say Dread is a little strong, but you know, you don't want it to fail. You want people to come and see what you work for and experience it. So it's kind of a hard thing if no one shows up. So what we really did was we, I did a lot of, I did some outreach with the schools and I got in touch with some people that are really good at marketing on my behalf. So it's just, I had some school teachers that I sort of sold on the idea. So they're very good at marketing. So it ended up being no problem at all. We got them on the third case the first time. And they just sort of showed up and I was really surprised. They just kept coming and I was really happy with that. But then we also went a little overwhelmed because it was more. Yeah, I was going to say, did you have enough for everybody to do that? So yeah, what we did, we did. And then we had to rethink how we did everything. So, and then so I would say making pre-sign off mandatory versus just saying you can't show up if you, because I didn't want to exclude anyone because I wanted to have enough. So I was just going with, hey, you know, you really have to. Well, the first time you do something, you don't know how popular it's going to be. So if I would do it again, I would make it mandatory so you know exactly how many kids are going to show up. Another thing I would say that 90 minutes is a lot of time. They do lose focus. I mean, after like 45 minutes and then maybe an hour, that's probably better than 90 minutes. It's a lot, you can get a lot done in 45 minutes if you know what they're supposed to be doing. So I would say probably go for an hour or 90 minutes. It's not a time, we couldn't pass the time, but it's also exhausting to have to run around and having six, seven kids working on something for an hour. It's also for the volunteers to have, you know, for their sake. And then I would really recommend, we were really lucky. We had some of our volunteers that one of them, he is a computer scientist. So he was into robotics and he understood the tech side of it. For some of one of our, make it more realistic. A couple of our puzzles out there, was like, we have like, I don't know if you know, Dash and Dot, there's some of these robots and kids that people are learning on. On the show we've had some people do Yeah, so you know, those ones using a block in scratch, which is the programming software that kids use on those. That's having someone that knows how to do that is pretty crucial. Otherwise I wouldn't necessarily bring it in. It comes a little bit boring. If you have to figure it out, it also becomes stressful. If you have to work on it, while the kids are waiting, just looking at you. Yeah, yeah. So that's another thing I just really, just prepare for it. And know you have people that know how to do the puzzles. And then we have a part two. I would say I have a staff to kid ratio of having no more than four kids per adult. We ended up having way more at times and it just becomes stressful. And you know, they, it's, we did it, we got, we did it on a Saturday. So they had a lot of things in their mind. And you know, we fed them sugar. So I don't know. That might be a... I don't know. So they were, you know, they were, they were a headache at times. Less sugar. So just having... No energy drinks for the kids. Yeah. I would say that, because I, my goal was to have I probably, if I was to do it again, I would choose fewer kids, but more focus on it. But I was really, I mean, I was more concerned about numbers than I think I should have been. But sometimes in the first time you're doing it, you want to have a lot. You want to show something for it, right? You want to show a lot of kids show up. And they did, but it, if you want to have 20, 25 kids, you also need at least five adults. I'll say maybe even six. And then a lot of what the white paper mentioned in the beginning, from your, as you create, it's talked about unbound creativity and how they can just sort of make whatever they want. And which is really good in that sort of brainstorming phase. But once you actually get down to making things, I would not recommend that either. I think it's, it's important not to give them, just make it too loose and too freely. Anything. They need to build that puzzle. Some direction to actually brainstorm something. What ended up being great for us was having puzzles and then make in, so showing, okay, this is a puzzle. You have to solve this puzzle. And now think about how you can make that puzzle your own. So you can make it your own in many ways. Like if you have some, just some math for our problem, you can make a similar math problem with the other numbers. And that's a basic thing. You can also make it in real life. That's something that sort of makes a lot of sense. So instead of having something on a piece of paper, make it out of clay and make it tactile. And then it's just, if they get the basic principle of one puzzle, then they can build on that and just make it their own. And again, we had a zombie themed room. So make it zombie themed. So instead of counting fruit, whatever, count brains. Instead of looking for something with, with Christmas, you look for something with a virus, you know. So you can get back to the flavor thing. And then it's important to ask for help. I mentioned we had the Chief of Police and the local radio, TV station help out. And that we had, and we, there's so many things we couldn't have done if we hadn't just reached out and just asked for help. I think you have something like this that's kind of fun. People don't mind helping out. You know, they volunteer at that time and everything became a lot better for it. Get the community involved, definitely. Especially the mayor and the jam. Yeah, exactly. The mayor as well as another thing, really just say, hey, you know, we have this thing. It sounds a little different, but I think it's going to be fun. And the kids are going to have a lot of fun. I think it's going to add value to the library and the community. So would you mind playing along? And I have not, not a single person sort of turned me down. Some people had something else to do suddenly, but no one said they didn't want to be involved. Right. So that was really valuable for us as well. And then another thing, that's back to the whole time thing. You should always have a plan for the entire session and have, I mentioned earlier, having simple backup tasks if something falls through. Like if you volunteer suddenly can't be there and you have a group of kids that now they can't work on this puzzle, have something that they can work on. So in our case, we fill the room with zombie related puzzles, but we also have zombie related props. So have some boxes they can paint with biohazard science and have something that can be done meanwhile. That's not a high, that doesn't require a lot on your end, but just make sure they still have good time while doing it. So that's just something that's important. So we had an entire room. Like we had $7,500. We were able to buy a flash screen TV to put our movie up on. We were able to buy laptops, Chromebooks and robots and all that. And that's expensive, you know. Yeah. And most libraries will not necessarily have that. Right. Having, applying for the grant and always looking for grants for anything you want to do is a good idea, but yeah, you can't always have that. So something we really thought a lot about and I, we thought a lot about while doing it and I thought a lot about afterwards is how to do it for cheaps. Like the shoe strength solution. So I put something called Breakout EDU up here on the slides and what that is is a resource for school teachers basically for how to incorporate puzzles in the classroom. And so what they use, what we relied heavily on and were inspired by was something like this. This is a, they call this a breakout box. You can buy them on their website for like $100, but what it really is, this is not a $100 thing, but you can buy wooden boxes that are nice looking with the logo on. This is a $4 box from Walmart and then this is like maybe $30 of locks for us it has from Amazon. So what this is is three locks. So let's say $50 in total. And then the rest, so this is a miniature escape room basically. I mentioned earlier, I won my energy drink and I've been yammering on for like 45 minutes at this point. So I'm getting thirsty. So what I want, so the story right now for example for this one would be to open this box and get me my energy drink. You can come up with a much better story I'm sure. So this is a $50 escape room but really what an escape room is is just sort of a lock with the storage behind it. It's really all it has to be. You don't need to have an entire room full of things. And so that's the thing that people places that don't have and like you had that separate storage room where you can actually lock them in. You can do something, you know, think outside the box or just something over in this corner of the library. You've got to figure this out too. Exactly. It can just be that. If you're ambitious, you can have several of these around the library. You know, you can have, I mean, and so this particular has, can you know, six locks? You can have six boxes. Yeah, it's got six different ones. It can have, and so on this one, we have a number lock and a work lock and a directional lock. There are many types of locks out there. It's just go on Amazon and look, you know, and then you can sort of see what, what, so build the process around what the solutions could be. So that's, this is like, I say $50, you can probably get it cheaper if you look for sales. And then use normal craft supplies. A lot of the things we ended up working on were things we already, either we already had that in that room we cleaned out, or we had some great children's librarians that have been working there for a long time and just have all these craft supplies. There's all sorts of leftover things. They have all these scraps lying around, you know, and they tend to be pretty organized about it. So you can ask about a lot of things and they will already have that lying around. I think that's true for many libraries. So you don't have to go out and buy all these new things. It's a way to sort of use a lot of things you already have lying around. So that I think that is really important. Then I have a slide here, a bullet point about modularity with the software. So what that is, is if you, in our case, we wrote a computer script that we had 10 of these boxes in our room basically. We wrote a script. So inside each of these boxes were like a password for the computer. We had to put open 10 boxes and put in 10 passwords in the computer. But that was each step. Yeah, and then finally the computer gives you the computer terminal in the room, gives you the solution for the safe and then you can open the safe and you get the antidote, which is a clay bottle they made. You know, it's kids making it. It's really fun. So the point of that being that we have what we call discrete puzzles and customizable difficulty levels. So you can change that script easily to say you only have to solve two puzzles out of 10. Right. Or you only have to, you have three puzzles. You don't have to sort of have 10 puzzles. That was just what we ended up for balance. And that's something that then can be modified for the age level too. Yeah, exactly. These are your puzzles for the younger kids. So you, for example, like tomorrow I'm going to have a group of, I think seven or eight graders from middle school in Brass City come in and they only have half an hour. So they're enough. But so what you don't do is you don't say you have an hour obviously, but say you have half an hour to solve five puzzles. So that can be kind of modified on different levels. So that's, and also in what I also mentioned that discrete puzzles. We have 10 puzzles in the room. They don't interact with each other. So I think that's important too. It makes, especially if I think it's easier if you do a professional escape room, you can probably have something that moves from puzzle to puzzle. But if you have different kids working on different puzzles, having them interact is just another layer of complexity that you don't necessarily need in your life. So I would just say make them completely discrete. So we have 10 completely discrete puzzles that have nothing to do with each other. And that's a good way that you can modify it for the group only has half an hour of the kids. You take out some of them and just do these. Just either you say only solve puzzles one through five or you only solve the puzzles on this side of the room. You know, that depends on what you end up having. That's nice. I said it's modifiable now. Yeah, yeah. So, and then we also, what I also think you can do is use what you're going to have in your collection for puzzles. And then like one of the puzzles we have is a library. It's what they had. So the kids had, so we had a bunch of, you know, discard books, weeded books, and they had all the dust jagged. So what we did was turn the just that dust jagged inside out because they're white on the inside. And then the kids wrote their own titles on the spine. And then there's a puzzle related to all that. You know, it's just kind of one of those things. We had a ton of weeded books and you can either sell them and eventually we will. But for now, now they're part of a puzzle, which is kind of fun. And you can also have, we had in the beginning, when we taught them how to do puzzles, we had library-related puzzles. You know, go find, you know, some Dewey-related, not too deep into it. You had to look up things in the catalog, run there in the library, figure this out. So that was the case. That somebody was actually asking, what kind of puzzles did you have them do work on in the first, in the initial month? That was very much things like that. You know, it was similar to what we ended up having in the room itself. And you can see the puzzles. I have provided the sort of the manual here. So what this is, this is a manual for the 10 puzzles. I don't know if anyone can see this, but this is like puzzle number three here. And then this is how to solve it and how to reset it. Oh, okay. So this is like the guide. Yeah, yeah. So this is a cheat sheet. So, and I'll, you have this document now, so you can just put that, give that to people. So it's, so there were simple puzzles, and I relied heavily on the breakout EDU, like a resource for that. They have a Google, they have a shared Google folder where you can basically go in and find three puzzles. So I relied on them to sort of, so I didn't have to come up with all of it myself. It takes a lot of time to come up with a puzzle that makes sense. So I would recommend going there. Especially because you're working within the confines of locks. You have to match these locks as well. So, and since the breakout EDU sort of framework, they typically operate with locks like these. It's an easy sort of way to tap into that. Find the solution, yeah. Yes. So let's see here. So this is, this is where I'm, so now just for fun, right? So let's, oh no, we're trapped. I didn't know exactly until earlier this morning. So let's say we're trapped in this room, right? So now, now you have three locks and you are trying to get me my monster energy ring. We're not sponsored by, I know you're drinking one too, but we're not sponsored by, this is completely coincidental. So, so this is an example of how an escape room could sort of work, right? And the story could be anything. Let's say we're trapped in here and the key is to open this box. So now you have a number lock. This is super simple. I made this this morning. This is a terrible example. So, so now you have to Google this because there's no way. Oh yeah. Because I figured we wouldn't have a library collection in here. On the normal circumstances, you would have to look this up in an actual resource somewhere, right? But since we don't have a library, I didn't wasn't expecting you to have a collection of books in here. You're probably going to have a number. Um, is that it? 25, no. The World Smurf World Record smashed by 2,510 Swansi students. Well, let's see. Dressed up as Smurfs. Wow. That's a lot of blue. That's a lot of blue. I had to say Swansi because I learned later on that that that that's been broken since then. So yeah, today go. So that that's an easy one. That's the first one. So this is a, I mean you shouldn't, I wouldn't use Google for this, but it's just a show sort of. So the idea is to look up in resources, obviously, and you know, have to look up things. So you can make it with resources of either, of was it based in the library, you know, go to this book. Databases as well, you know. Or something that's in that room that would have the answer. Yeah, exactly. And they can be focused around. And depending on, again, if you're doing the the smallest thing, then, you know, I would go look it up in the library somehow. So that that's sort of one example. So let's see the next one. This is a, this is a terrible one. Oh, God. So this, yeah, we probably don't have enough time to, so, so, so this, but this is an example of, of something I made the kids sort of go through. So I put it on the top, you see this is a directional lock. So this is, this looks like this. I don't think it's feel at home. You can see this. Yeah. It's a lock that has like four arrows going into each of the directions, just like the picture on there. Yeah. So, so. I've seen that kind of lock. That's cool. So there's another, and it's kind of, you do, the locks aren't necessarily, you don't need them necessarily. It could also just be a solution to put into a computer. But having that tangible thing really seems to resonate well with the children. I really, I like it too. They're kind of cool. As you say, it's kind of cool lock, right? So I'm going to help you out with this one. Yeah. Unless people at home want to write a solution real quick. But so the point of this is that, I do know how to play chess by any chance. I played when I was a kid with my dad, but not for a long time. So, so the point here is you need someone that is also, this might be an example of like could be hard if no one knows how to play chess. So this is, we don't have this, we were considering having something like this in the final room. But then if you have someone who does not know how to play chess, then you're stuck. Yeah. So you have to think about that when you're making these puzzles. So the point here being that, I probably won't be able to open this because I didn't bring my solutions. But so the point, the way chess works is that the first piece, basically why it has to stop. You know, there's only one possible, there's only one possible way that this board can end up looking this way. Oh, I see. Okay. How did those pieces get there? Yeah. Yeah. And then you see the other thing. So the first thing is that some white piece moved up. So the first thing is white because you look at the gray arrows on that thing. So I hope this makes sense to people at home. If not, I do apologize. I thought it sounded like a cool idea when I did it. So, so it's basically the first one is going to be up and no left because that's left gray arrow, but it's a white up left gray arrow. And then the next one is black down. And that is just a down. And then you have a diagonal white. So that's a right. Then you have a diagonal black. So that's an up. And then another diagonal white. And then the lock is open. So that's normally you have, I didn't know how much time it would have. So that's one of those things where it gets hectic because I'm thirsty for all the world, all the world is ending. And you know, you need to be able to get a little, a little frazzled about it. Exactly. You know, you have that timeline going here. And in the room, you've got this clock counting down. So we have a movie going on. You have the zombies moaning, groaning in the background. And then you have a timer that's sort of, it's counting down all the time. Lots of distractions. It is, it is. And then so the last one, I'm just thirsty. So this is another example. So this is just a riddle. I'm not going to torment you and make, I'll just going to tell you the, because I also want to, people have any more questions or anything than if you have any more questions. So the solution, do you have an idea? Is it the moon? It's very close, very, very close. Very close, can you? Nobody's. Nobody, anybody know? Does anyone know at home? Type in the answer. It's close to being the moon, not quite the moon. A star? Yes. Instead? Sorry. It is. It is. Well done. So this is a word lock that has a whole bunch of letters around it and you guys spell out the words. There you go. So that's obviously more, I mean, so this is an easy one. You have a riddle and you can just find the riddle online, honestly. Or you can, we had, well, another thing we had is a bunch of folks with puzzles and riddles in them. So that's another thing I wanted to, that you can also use, if you want to do this on a smaller scale, you probably have some in your collection already. So mine, just mine, T's and whatnot. So we use that a lot as well. So the kids, we just had them out for the kids to sort of use. And all I can, I can hide from. Cool. Yeah, so that's, this is a very, another thing I want to say that this is great with a little bit of candy. Like if they, if you, I mean, you can always motivate with some snacks. Of course. So we did that as well. So Do you want your pizza? I had a great time with showing them candy and then locking the candy in boxes. And now you have to work for them. It works. I mean, they get a little annoyed, but it works out well. You know, because it's fun, because now you can, sure you can have all this candy, but you do need to think about it first. Yeah. So where do you get those, the locks or those? This is just, all these on Amazon. Amazon, okay. You also have, I would do, they have, you know, they have a, I guess, you know, Home Depot. I bought them at Walmart, you know. Yeah. For regular, your traditional number locks. Yeah. And also with, I didn't bring one, but also just locks with keys are fun, because then you can hide the keys somewhere clever. Oh, right. There's a lot of, the puzzle gets you to the key, it gets you to the lock. There's a lot of stuff you can think about. So just regular key locks. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I really, that's a, it's kind of different devices. I really, I like the idea of, and it came to us later, that the symbol, how simple it can be, that you really don't have to have this gigantic room. I mean, technically, if you're really ambitious, you can do it in a much larger scale, and have your entire library be in the escape room. That's true. I know, I was, I was thinking about that, because some libraries do, do the lock-ins for the kids. Sure. Yeah. Sometimes now, that that could be the event. So that, that was all of you. So then you would, you have like these boxes around the library, where it makes sense. And then they had to go around and find things within the building. And you know, look for things in books, in the nooks and crannies. That would be great as well. So I can sort of scale it from being an entire building, to being just a simple box. Technically, it could just be a lock without a box, but it's kind of more fun to have this. Something that you get after. Yeah. Yeah. And it's going to open something. Like you said, the candy box. It resonates very well with them. So, and me as well, I like it. So, so this last one, if anyone has any questions, this is my, I put my email up there, we haven't to talk about it. I linked to a video with some of the projects that came out of this, from the grant we got. We were in the library journal. Yeah. Yes, I saw that. Yeah. So I linked to that as well. I will be presenting about this at the NLA conference in October as well. So I'll be going through a lot of the same things. So, so I'll be happy to meet with anyone that would be interested in learning more about this and for advice. I didn't know you were going to be, I haven't looked at the schedule yet for conference. I didn't even know you were going to be doing this at conference. I just, we've been following the articles as this has been going on. Sure. Waiting for it to be finished. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like I have you come on the show. No, but it's fine. I mean, I like talking about it. It's a fun for me to sort of to be out there. And I hope we really had such a good response. People really respond well to in the community and just I know the kids had fun. They kept coming back. I said that's a good sign of them liking it. And we had, we also had kids asking when we're doing it again. And since as you may tonight, I'll be stepping down or moving soon. So I don't want to, I don't mean lots of promises because it's a lot of work, especially on this scale. But that's why I think these smaller boxes can be fun. It could just be one or thing. But now that it's been done, that's what somebody asked. And we kind of talked about this before would be difficult to change it to a different room or different room or challenge. I suppose now that you've done it once, it will be easier another time. But you still have to go through the same process of, like you said, new puzzles, new themes. If you have the boxes set up, like we have, we have boxes with locks in our room. We have the computer set up with the way you put in the codes and you have all those things. Well, half of the room has been built. It's not puzzles, but the flavor. So it's all these weird zombies. That will take time. But that being said, it might not be as bad as you would think because most libraries that I know have Christmas decorations and Halloween decorations lying around. They change stuff all the time, yeah. So if they just put all that in the room suddenly, just now it's a Christmas room, then it's not that hard to change. I mean, again, you can change the flavor or you can change. I had the riddle, the star riddle here. That's not very original. I just looked something up a line this morning because I knew it was becoming. I was too late in preparing for this. But it doesn't take a lot of time to change the basic puzzles. Yeah. And since the room is standing since... There's lots of resources out there for that. Yeah, it really is. And now if I had to do a new one, it would take a third of the time that I did the first time around. Yeah. Don't you figure it out? It's very doable. A few other questions have come in. If you guys do have any other questions, go ahead and type them in or tell me in the microphone you can ask your question that way. I'm going to jump around a little bit here, but I don't think I mentioned this. Is there a minimum or maximum number size to the group? Like how many people should it take to do this? Absolutely. So again, I will refer to the manual for all the rules and whatnot. But I did not mention that, no. And that's what... Isn't that what the word... We have that word document. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So this is going to be available just so you guys know afterwards. This is how... I'm going to show it to you briefly. This word document we're going to make available with the show recording. Yes. So you'll have... This is all there. So this is sort of there. So as I can leave from here, like we welcome groups of four or six players once a day. Why once a day? Because it takes time to reset the room. And if you need a staff member to be there, you don't want to have them dovetail each other. Because then it just... It takes a while to reset it. But we say four to six players. That's kind of a... It's just a guideline. It doesn't have to be that way. We had three people go through successfully, but those were three adults. I would say at least two adults and maybe two kids at least. Because it's just some of these things take time. You know, you're the smartest person in the world. It still takes time to solve the puzzle. Because physically you have to do things. Like you have to actually solve jigsaw puzzles. And no matter how good you are at it, it will still take time. It's going to take time. Yeah. So four to six people, that's what we sort of recommend. For that sense. Yes. And you didn't actually charge anything for this. You said if they want to give a donation to the library, that's nice, but no charge. We have some people donate money. We do say free will donation. It's mostly for fun. I mean, I don't... I like most things. Escape rooms that you do go to, like that they have are professional ones. They charge a lot, yeah. Well, it depends on what you think a lot is, but some of them can be fairly expensive. It's just they charge like up to, I see like $25 per person. So this is a good way to do it for cheap. But we had a lot of, we had quite a few, we had some donations come in. We don't stand with our hand like this. We're waiting for money. No, it's a library program, which like anything is traditionally, usually they're free. Sometimes there's like, if you're doing a craft, they pay for the supply. Depending on the program. If we have paid for all this ourselves with taxpayer money, for example, like especially all this extra stuff we got, that might be more of a point of actually making a business model out of it. But that's not all what this was. Honestly, the most important thing for us was the process up to the room being open. It's super fun to have one now. But the important part of this was honestly the building it. You know, that was that. I think that's when they... Yeah, that's most of this one that I thought was great. Escape rooms have heard about all of it, but having the kids involved with creating it and everything... We like to say we're the first one in the world that we had kids building one. I mean, I'm not... I have to be sure of that, but I hadn't heard of other places. Stars we know. Now, for that budget, someone is asking, you had $7,500 from that grant. Do you have a breakdown of how it was spent? Or do you can... And not with me. Approximately, little less than half, that was materials. So that is... That's buying the robot and the TV we wanted. Yeah, it's in the big screen TV, honestly. Yeah, these locks are great, but if you buy enough of them, they also start costing money. And just various... We needed some Chromebooks to run some of our personal stuff like that. So that's a little less than half of that. Then we had $1,000 approximately for marketing. So that was great to get the word out that we still have some marketing money left. We're still going to push it later this year. There's a lot going on. Then we had money for food. And then we had money for... I'm going to say like a little more than $1,000. It's basically just getting food every Saturday for a group of 20 kids. But the kids are working on it. It costs money too. And then we had materials for the libraries. We got to buy some puzzle books. I think approximately, I'm going to say $600 to buy materials to kind of boost our collection with just getting more books about puzzles and brain teachers and whatnot. And then finally we had something for marketing. And now marketing, I already mentioned that. One last thing. Yeah, materials for kids. So what I ended up giving all of them was a has-been-a-lock at the end. So they also got something like... So they got to choose a specific lock because after they played with these things for four months, it kind of cooled to get their own. So they can go home and I'm going to lock that parents' fridge or something like that and just make them solve a way to open it. That's in trouble. Where did you get the puzzle books from? Do you have specific ones that you would recommend? I can send some. That was on. I can't remember, honestly. I mean, we bought them in February last year. And I'm sorry, I can't remember exactly what we... If you want to, I would say email. Email them and ask. There's the email address. Sure, I'll send you a list of what we got, what we had there. He'll still be there through Thanksgiving then he goes on to another job. And I also... What we also... God was then one of the retired math teachers from one of the high schools in town came by with a stack of books because you heard about it. Ah, they don't think they had their own. But I can just send me an email. I'll send you a list of some of the books we have. Cool. And someone else wants to know related to conference. They actually are going to be visiting Nebraska City after our conference. They want to know when you're open on Saturday so they can come and take a look at it. But before... After the conference, you can book a time, just call the library and book a time. But it has to be before one o'clock, typically on a Saturday. Okay. Yeah, awesome. But what are the regular hours of the library just to go and visit it? Oh, that's until five, nine to five. Nine to five on Saturday. There you go, Claudette. You can stop by there. Cool. That's a good question. Glad I could answer that one. And I see you said you've written an article. It's going to be coming up for... I read there. Yeah, the library with the like pie. We're just going to accept it. So we're supposed to submit our first drive in a couple of weeks. So it'll be... It'll add a lot to what was not in the library and the article. It's sort of a shorter one. Right. So this one is more comprehensive of, I guess, all the lofty ideas behind why we do this and what sort of makes sense. So I have not worked enough on that yet. You got time. I will get on to that. I will get on that. So yeah. Absolutely. All right. Any other last minute... Are we wrapped up then? I know this is your last slide. Yes, this is my last slide. I just want to really recommend looking at this to see sort of the basics of how it... I think it makes sense after having watched this presentation to sort of see... So just read this through a quick and... There's rules. Got it. So there are rules and then all the puzzles. Just to give you an idea sort of what the puzzles are, what the puzzles were in our room. So it can... I think just give that a read if you're interested in all this and I'll bring this and similar these things to NLA. But if you're planning on going and doing the puzzles... Yeah, then don't look at it first. This is all the answers for this particular one. So some group of librarians show up after NLA and solve it in 10 minutes, then I'll be suspicious. I'll know you guys. I don't know. I'll be on to you. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you, everyone. Yeah, since we have kind of been mentioning it, can you tell us where you're off to for your new job? I will. Yes. You've been here in Nebraska for quite a few years now. Yes. How long have you been here? Oh, three years more or less. I've been three years up for James. Yeah. Well, I will... Well, I have the great honor of being the new executive director of the Museum of Danish America in Elkhorn in Nebraska and in Iowa. In Iowa. It's going over to Iowa. Yeah. Well, I'll still be living in Nebraska. But it's a really fantastic opportunity. So it'll be very, very cool for me to go into that field and still be working with the cultural heritage for a slightly different angle, I guess, perspective. And I get to interact more... I get to sort of work with both my homes, but I do feel at home in Nebraska, but I'll be in the Midwest and in America in general. But I look forward to sort of having more to do with Denmark again. Right, where are you from? Where you do end up missing it, where you're not... Of course. You know, where you haven't been in a home... I mean, I get to go home, but not as often as I would like, you know. I think a lot of people can relate to that. Oh, yeah. I am only from New York and I get it, yeah. So, yeah, you know what I mean, you know. Sometimes you just want to go back. So it'll be cool to do it like professionally as well. Yes. You'll have reasons to travel to a home. Yeah, I will, yeah. So, you know, I'm very excited. It's a really great honor for me and I was very happy that it shows me. Yeah. It seems to be a perfect fit as I'd meant to. I hope so. I think so too. And I'd asked you before, I just want to say, now we're on the show, here in Lincoln, we have the Society for Germans from Russia. So, obviously, that's a population here. And Iowa was a big place where a lot of people came from Denmark in the United States and that's why it's there. Yes, Iowa. I would just Midwest in general. Midwest, like Omaha, it has a lot... A tremendous amount of people are actually claiming Danish ancestry or Danish heritage. So, I mean, there are several pockets. Sure. Utah actually, there's a lot of Danish Americans out in California made a soda. So, Des Moines and Omaha. So, the reason why sort of... I think, specifically, where the museum is located is just one of the places where a lot of people came over at a certain time. And they just settled in one place. So, it's a fantastic museum, really. I would recommend everyone to come and see it. But that's another thing. You said it's only like an hour from Omaha in Iowa. It is really... I was first time... I was kind of floored by how... by the scope of what they've done out there. So, yeah. Well, good luck. Thank you so much. We'll miss you. Although, you're still going to be in Nebraska and do a thing. We'll be in Nebraska very much, yes. And you're not leaving completely, which is good. All right. I think we will wrap it up for today then. No other urgent questions came in about your presentation. Well, we're good. But thank you very much for that. Absolutely. This is great. As I said, we've been following along with the news articles as we got the grant and then the working on it and we're waiting and waiting for it to come be real things. And I'm glad it's... It turned out... I mean, in hindsight, I would have done things differently, but I would not have... But we've also done it the same way. It turned out really well for us. And it wasn't just a lot of fun. And I think doing something like this for a public library is just... It really is a great way to get out there. Oh, yeah. It's a lot of not necessarily free, but a lot of it go to advertising and marketing and just branding. Providing something for the... And that's what a lot of library programs are, providing something for people in the community to come and do and participate in. And this is one thing, these escape rooms are becoming very popular. I know I see lots of people post in their pictures and have made it out of this one or whatever. So why wouldn't the library do it? Well, I think framing it in that creative thing where you have kids actually building in a form without really well-formed. Educational? Yes, very much. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you very much. Email them as any questions you have over the next month or so. Yeah. One or two, but that'll still be there. Then check them out if you're here coming to Nebraska, to the Nebraska Library Association, School Libraries Association annual conference is up in Omaha in later this month, October 20th that week, as he said. And keep eye open for the article coming soon. And we'll find... When that link comes up, I read that site too. So I'll add it to the links when it's actually... Oh, good. Yeah, I'll let you know. Cool. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you everyone for attending. As we said, the show has been recorded, is being recorded as we speak, as we sit here. It will be loaded onto our website later this afternoon. And I'll show you where that is here. Let's just grab the keyboard. What's great about Encompass Live so far, if you spell it right, keyboard is not purchased. If you spell it right and your keyboard works... Close enough. We're pretty much the only thing called Encompass Live. So Google Encompass Live or any variation, and you can find our website. The current, the show that we just recorded will be here right underneath our upcoming shows, is our archived sessions. And that will show you where... This is what we've got from previous, last week's session was on Pokemon Go. And then we'll have the same thing later today. We'll be the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and the handout, the Word document with the guide, and any of the links that were mentioned during the show will be all available there. All of you who attended will be sent an email when it's ready. So that wraps up for today's show. Hope you join us next week when our topic is circulating the Internet how to loan Wi-Fi hotspots. Our Norfolk Public Library up in Northeastern Nebraska has started doing this just this year. And Jessica Chamberlain is their director and a couple of their staff people will be on with us next week to talk about how they are doing this. And now you've seen articles about things like New York Public Library doing it and big programs. But they're doing it here locally as well, so they're gonna come on and tell us how they are doing that. As I mentioned, the NLA annual conference is coming up that week. It's the one week of the year that we do not have a show. We take one week off. That's it. Every other week I'm here. And because we're all at conference for that. So the week after that, there will not be an Encampus Live. That's the one. So don't worry about that. But we'll be back the next week with Comic-Con Maker-Cons at your library. So check in with us as well. Also, if you are on Facebook, Encampus Live does have a Facebook page. You can click here to get to it. And this will probably pop up with some annoying thing about joining Facebook because it always does. There we go. But we post here when our shows are coming up, when our recordings are available. So if you want to... And here's your reminder to log in to today's show. So if you're big on Facebook user, you give us a like over there and you'll be notified of what we're doing on the show. And that wraps it up. Thank you very much everyone for attending. Thank you for coming over this morning. And we'll see you next time on Encampus Live. Bye-bye.