Experiential learning in virtual reality (VR) has gained considerable attention from both practitioners and researchers in recent years. Despite its potential, there is still a gap in effectively engaging students through experiential learning. Gamification has emerged as a promising strategy to bridge this gap by incorporating interactive and motivational elements into learning experiences. To explore the potential of combining gamification with experiential learning in VR, we conducted a longitudinal study with 68 undergraduate students enrolled in a human-computer interaction (HCI) course. The study focused on a gamified simulation of Fitts’ Law, a fundamental concept for modelling human movement in HCI, to evaluate its impact on learner engagement and the translation of this engagement into knowledge gains over both the short and long term. Our findings indicated that the gamified experiential learning approach significantly enhanced learner engagement, especially affective engagement, compared to traditional methods that rely on texts and figures. The longitudinal data also suggested that the approach led to better knowledge retention. However, no relationship was found between the observed learner engagement and knowledge change. This highlights the need for further research to study how to effectively convert learner engagement into measurable knowledge gains through experiential learning in gamified simulations.