Goggles On, Bagels Out: A Randomized Hazard Hunt in a Browser Replica of a Real Teaching Laboratory

Students are usually introduced to the layout of a teaching laboratory, and to where its eyewash, shower, extinguisher and waste containers are, during a safety lecture on the first day of lab, a session that also covers the syllabus and the first experiment. I built a walkable, browser-based replica of the actual laboratory my students use, from a phone scan and photographs of the room, and turned it into a safety inspection. Each time a student opens the virtual lab, five hazards drawn at random from thirty-one are hidden in the room. Every hazard is tied to a rule in the course syllabus, from a drink on a bench or a fume hood sash left wide open to a classmate without goggles or a sleeve on fire. Students find and click each hazard, read what is wrong and what to do, carry out hands-on tasks such as dropping a used needle in the sharps container or guiding a splashed classmate to the eyewash, answer an emergency question, evacuate by the posted route when a fire alarm sounds, and finish with a report of what they found and missed. The inspection sits between a safety prelab page and the graded safety quiz in the learning management system; students must score at least 70% on the quiz before they are admitted to the lab room. The replica runs in an ordinary web browser with no headset or installation, downloads in about 31 MB, and was built by one instructor with a phone, free or low-cost software and generative AI tools. This report describes how the replica was built, how the hazards were designed and how the module fits into a course. Student outcomes will be evaluated in a later study.