Escape Room Challenges to Foster Engagement and Skills in Computer Science

This document presents the design and evaluation of a Harry Potter-themed escape room deployed as a gamified formative assessment in undergraduate computer science courses. Grounded in the MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) framework and prior work on gamification and escape rooms, the authors argue that escape rooms aligned with course outcomes and narrative design offer a promising alternative to traditional assessment. The work moves from design rationale through a six-mission game spanning debugging, web development, database concepts (including a virtual reality mission), and physical teamwork challenges, such as a chance-based envelope task, a Quidditch-inspired throwing activity, and a rotating-role software debugging task.

Survey responses across the six missions were broadly favorable. Most students agreed that the activities improved communication, trust, role participation, computational thinking, and perceived teamwork, and both the VR and non-VR groups reported comparable engagement. These findings rest on Likert-scale ratings and word-cloud analysis, however, and no statistical testing is reported, which limits the strength of any causal inference about learning gains.

The authors conclude that the escape room enhanced student engagement and fostered logical reasoning, collaborative problem-solving, and critical thinking in software construction. They emphasize that real-time, formative feedback embedded in the game mirrors authentic development conditions, positioning gamified assessment as a scalable model for technical higher education. These conclusions are supported primarily by qualitative observation rather than quantitative measurement, so the evidence should be regarded as preliminary and exploratory in nature.