A Virtual Reality Escape Room Game for Learning Computer Architecture Concepts

The application of virtual Reality (VR) games in education has been explored in recent years with successful outcomes in promoting student engagement and motivation. Escape room, an increasingly popular form of games used for both recreational and educational purposes, has shown to promote creative thinking and support assessment to evaluate students’ understanding of a particular subject or skill. In this work, we present a VR escape room game for assisting university level computer science students to learn basic concepts in computer architecture. Situated in a futuristic sci-fi theme, our game challenges students’ understanding in (1) binary, decimal, and hexadecimal number representations, (2) memory and register access operations, (3) assembly language, as well as (4) string and instruction representation. Our post-game questionnaires have shown high student immersion as well as positive learning outcomes.