Can You Escape da Vinci’s Curse? A Chemistry Escape Room for Skills Consolidation

We present the development and evaluation of “da Vinci’s Curse”, a chemistry escape room experience designed to consolidate laboratory skills in a fun and interactive setting. Inspired by the maestro, Leonardo da Vinci, the escape room challenges students to complete a series of puzzles in teams to escape “da Vinci’s Curse”. Guided in their journey by instructional riddles from da Vinci himself, these puzzles focus on practical laboratory techniques including liquid–liquid extraction, acid–base behavior of functional groups, infrared spectroscopy, and thin-layer chromatography. Evaluation of the effectiveness of “da Vinci’s Curse” by a Likert methodology found that student confidence in a range of key laboratory, transferable, and employability skills increased significantly and that students enjoyed the experience of working with others in the laboratory.