ESTALMAT Leadership & Education
The ESTALMAT program aims to nurture mathematically gifted younger students through engaging, advanced activities. As part of my leadership contribution to the program, I designed an experience that broke away from traditional worksheets and brought math into the physical world.
The result was a collaborative Math Escape Room. Instead of standard arithmetic puzzles, students had to solve complex logic challenges centered around graph theory and cryptography, unlocking physical clues as they progressed.
Digital Interface & Live-Event Resilience
The core of the experience was a digital interface acting as the main terminal of the escape room. I coded the backend entirely in Vanilla PHP utilizing an ultra-fast Flat JSON Database persistence layer.
Because the terminal was exposed during an active live event, ensuring its stability was paramount. I engineered strict rate limiting and other resilience features to prevent brute-force attacks, and wired the system to unlock physical clueswhen teams entered the correct sequence.
Key Highlights
- Designed and coded digital interface for ESTALMAT Math Escape Room
- Built Vanilla PHP backend with flat JSON database for puzzle state management
- Implemented graph theory puzzle mechanics for interactive learning
- Added IP-based rate limiting for security and abuse prevention
- Integrated hardware triggers for physical clue unlocking
- Created engaging educational experience for ESTALMAT program participants
- Combined web technology with hardware for immersive learning environment