Harry Potter Themed Digital Escape Room for Addressing Misconceptions in Stoichiometry

Chemistry is often seen as an abstract and content-heavy subject. Many students struggle with chemistry because they attempt to memorize the content without understanding the concepts. As a result, students often have misconceptions. COVID-19 has driven teaching and learning online, and an escape room teaching method, which is a way to enhance student engagement, has gained popularity among educators in higher education. This study examines the effectiveness of teaching through a digital escape room as compared to a typical online lesson with a collaborative learning method to address misconceptions in stoichiometry. A Harry Potter themed digital escape room is created to spark the students' interest in chemistry and address misconceptions. Thirty-eight students from the Nanyang Polytechnic Foundation Program participated in this study. The students completed a pretest, a post-test, and a survey, in addition to participating in the digital escape room and a typical online lesson. Four topics were covered in this study: balancing chemical equations, calculating empirical formulas, identifying the type of chemical bonding, and interpreting element symbols. Out of these four topics, it was discovered that students tended to have difficulty calculating empirical formulas. It was found that, on average, students showed a 10% improvement in test scores after being taught through the digital escape room. This result is similar to results obtained from a typical online lesson with a collaborative learning method (9% improvement). This implies that a digital escape room is equally as effective as a typical online lesson with a collaborative learning method at addressing misconceptions. Teaching through a digital escape room has shown potential additional benefits of enhancing soft skills, promoting teamwork, the ability to work under time pressure, communication skills, innovation competency, and increasing student motivation. The researcher recommends the use of a digital escape room to complement typical lessons for these additional benefits.