An escape game, is a game in which a team of players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal in a limited amount of time. The goal is often to escape from the site of the game. 【小题1】

For most escape games, even the very challenging ones with very high difficulty ratings, the puzzles and clues are surprisingly simple. They are just cleverly hidden and worded to make them appear difficult to solve. Don’t make things difficult by looking for complex solutions. 【小题2】

Sometimes, the escape game creators add a puzzle to confuse players, but this hardly happens. As usual, every puzzle is important and each clue has the potential for revealing the key. Carefully analyze every puzzle you come across. Don’t ignore any, as it may be central to achieving your goal of breaking out. If worse comes to worst, ask for a clue from the game master.

Escape games can get really challenging. To break out, you need to totally bury yourself in the game. Think outside the box and motivate all your creative juices. Remember when you were a kid and you would think up all these imaginative stories and situations. 【小题4】. Think like a 4th grader and you’ll find the game more enjoyable and the puzzles easier to solve.

Is the honey bucket just a metal thing filled with human waste or is there a clue under it? 【小题5】. We get so stuck on how things are normally used that our minds refuse to think of alternative ways of using them. And just to ease your fears, no escape game will put you in a room with a bucket full of human waste. Like I mentioned earlier, use your imagination and think outside the box.

For years video games have been criticized for making people more antisocial, overweight or depressed. But now researchers are finding that video games can actually change us for the better and improve both our body and mind.

Games can help to develop physical skills. Pre-school children who played interactive games have been shown to have improved motor skills, for example they can kick, catch and throw a ball better than children who don’t play video games. A study found that those who played video games were 27 percent faster and made 37 percent fewer errors than those who didn't.

Games also benefit a variety of brain functions, including decision-making. People who play action-based games make decisions 25 percent faster than others, according to one study. It was also found that the best gamers can make choices and act on them up to six times a second, four times faster than most people. In another study by researchers from the University of Rochester in New York, experienced gamers were shown to be able to pay attention to more than six things at once without getting confused, compared with the four that most people can normally keep in mind.

There is also evidence that gaming can help with psychological problems. At the University of Auckland in New Zealand, researchers asked 94 young people diagnosed with depression to play a 3D fantasy game called SPARX and in many cases, the game reduced symptoms of depression more than conventional treatment.

Zhonglin Wang started playing table tennis only four years ago. But last year, he and other researchers came up with a clever way to improve their game: Build a smart table.

Now they’ve just introduced a prototype to the public. It can measure where a ball lands, how fast the ball’s going and where it’s headed. The table can do that because its innovative wood surface forms the top layer of a novel self-powered sensor. The data it acquires could help players to perform better, says Wang.

Wang is a materials scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta. He describes the invention as a machine that can learn to analyze how someone plays. Importantly, the new smart table doesn’t need a battery to detect the ball. When a ball hits the wood, it sets off a chain of events that can both generate a small electric current and record the ball’s behavior.

Wang is an expert at inventing devices that provide their own power. In 2012, he invented a triboelectric (摩擦生电的) nano-generator. He calls it TENG, for short. Even if you’ve never heard of “triboelectricity”, you know the phenomenon. Most of us call it static electricity. The first TENG that Wang put together in 2012 looked like a sandwich. It had layers of charged materials separated by a small gap. When the sandwich bent or changed shape, its layered materials rubbed against each other. This caused electrons to start building up on one side.

What makes the new game table truly unique is its use of wood as one of the TENG’s layers. As it turns out, Wang explains, “Wood is an excellent triboelectric material.” Building a full-size game table would require a large grid of wood TENGs. Wang says that’s on his drawing board as a project for the future.