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 made collaborative problem-solving the centre of a live session.
The result was a collaborative Math Escape Room. Instead of standard arithmetic puzzles, students had to solve complex logic challenges centered around graph theory, RSA cryptography, geometry, and the Doomsday algorithm. Solving one stage updated the shared state and revealed the next route for all participants.
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 added IP-based rate limiting, shared attempt tracking, and an organizer dashboard for countdowns, level controls, resets, and emergency overrides during the session.
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
- Synchronized shared progress so each solved puzzle unlocked the next stage for every participant
- Combined graph theory, RSA cryptography, geometry, and the Doomsday algorithm
- Provided an organizer dashboard for countdowns, level controls, attempts, and emergency overrides