Scavenger Hunt in a Virtual World Helps Shy Students Speak Up and Revise

Revision is the part of university life that almost nobody loves. Students are told to re-read lecture notes, grind through tutorial sheets, and complete take-home assignments, yet research has repeatedly shown that these passive approaches do little to make foundational knowledge stick. For first-year information technology undergraduates in Sri Lanka, the problem is compounded by an educational culture shaped by more than a decade of rote learning, in which pupils arrive at university expecting teachers to hand them every fact they need rather than having learned to retain and rebuild knowledge independently. A new study published in Discover Education suggests that a surprisingly low-tech corner of the metaverse may offer a way out: a 2D virtual world, run through an ordinary web browser, in which students hunted for hidden tokens, solved subject-specific puzzles, and, in the process, began talking to each other in ways they never did in a physical classroom.

The study, conducted by Punsisi Somaratne of Cardiff University, involved 49 first-year IT students at a Sri Lankan higher education institute. The participants were drawn from a single cohort using convenience sampling, which meant they all shared a common set of foundation modules: Programming, Database, Data Structures and Algorithms, Computer Systems, and Software Engineering. Rather than building an expensive 3D immersive environment, the researcher used Second Life, a long-established virtual world, but ran it in a browser so that the content was viewed in a 2D perspective. This choice was deliberate. Three-dimensional virtual worlds demand powerful hardware, fast internet connections, and specialised software, resources that remain out of reach for many students in developing countries because of the digital divide, poor infrastructure, and financial constraints. A 2D view, by contrast, requires nothing beyond a standard browser, making collaborative virtual learning feasible in a South Asian context without any specialised resources.

The learning activity itself was a scavenger hunt designed according to game-based learning principles and structured through a quest-based model. Thirty-four questions, each aligned with the learning outcomes of the first-year IT subjects, were embedded in a virtual port environment originally built by the University of the West of England for its own virtual worlds course. Clicking on a hidden token delivered a question to the student. Groups then discussed the answer, and once they solved it, a hint appeared in the chat window pointing them toward the next object, such as a stone labelled with a particular input. This chain of tokens, questions, hints, and objects turned revision into a sequence of quests, drawing on evidence that puzzles and challenges heighten motivation and that game-based formats promote both cognitive and social skills when students have opportunities to collaborate.

The study was anchored in Social Constructivism, the theory associated with Vygotsky which holds that knowledge is built through negotiation, discussion, and collaboration, and that a learner’s Zone of Proximal Development, the gap between what a student can do alone and what they can achieve with support, can be raised through interaction with more knowledgeable peers and teachers. It also drew on Self-Regulated Learning theory, which frames learners as agents who plan their own actions, seek resources and feedback, and take responsibility for their progress beyond formal teaching hours. These two lenses shaped both the design of the activity and the thematic analysis of the data, which was collected through observations, focus groups with groups of three to six students, and open-ended feedback surveys. Triangulating these three methods helped reduce bias and cross-validate the findings, and the study was approved by ethics committees in Sri Lanka and at the University of the West of England, following British Educational Research Association guidelines.

One of the clearest findings concerned self-paced engagement. Because virtual worlds are persistent, meaning the environment and its contents remain in place between sessions, students returned to the scavenger hunt outside scheduled hours to rehearse questions at their own speed. Observations confirmed that students logged in beyond the activity timetable to practice. One student explained the value of this flexibility in striking terms: they described being slower than their group members, who helped them, but wanting to try the questions alone because it helped them remember the theory. Another student, who described themselves as shy about asking questions, said the virtual space was not scary, that they could move freely and choose whether to talk or chat. This is learner agency in action: students setting their own goals, managing their own revision, and requesting feedback when they needed it, exactly the pattern Zimmerman’s self-regulation framework predicts when learners are given the tools to take initiative.

The collaborative results were, if anything, more striking. Students reported that their collaboration was higher in the virtual space than in person, and the observations backed this up: avatars approached the teacher’s avatar or their peers’ avatars to request hints, clarify concepts, and correct each other’s mistakes. The mechanism behind this transformation appears to be psychological safety. Avatars carried anonymous nicknames, giving students a psychological shield, since, as one participant put it, even if they made a mistake, no one knew it was them. Others contrasted the classroom, where everyone can see you and the fear of judgement silences questions, with the virtual world, where group members asked questions without being scared because no one was staring at them. Multimodal communication, combining text chat with voice, gave quieter students additional channels through which to participate.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence came from students who had never spoken up before. In focus groups, participants confirmed that a classmate who was always silent in the physical classroom had taken the initiative in the virtual world, guiding the group to find tokens and solve questions when others were lost. Students who could not solve a problem asked friends to teach them, and later reported that they could now do it on their own, a textbook illustration of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development being stretched upward through peer support. For a South Asian context, where prior research has documented that cultural practices tend to make student engagement in collaborative work passive, this shift is significant. The anonymity and psychological safety of the avatar-based environment appear to have temporarily suspended the social pressures that normally suppress open interaction, creating a more inclusive learning space in which students could choose the communication style that suited them.

The study was not uncritical, however, and its findings on the limits of educational technology deserve attention. Some students found that elaborate, fantastical avatars, such as mythical creatures, were distracting and unsuitable for an academic atmosphere, suggesting that even in synthetic environments learners prefer a realistic experience when the purpose is education. More materially, students who could access the virtual world through university infrastructure sometimes could not use it properly at home because of poor internet connections or incompatible hardware. The author argues that simply embracing technology is not enough if inequalities in resources persist, and that adopting 2D virtual worlds in South Asia must be done in a culturally responsive way, reflecting the principles of critical digital pedagogy, which asks learners and educators to reflect on social inequalities embedded in educational technology. There were also cultural residues inside the virtual space itself: some students still preferred to work individually, and a few believed that completing assigned work separately and then combining it into a group product constituted collaboration, a reminder that thirteen years of rote schooling do not dissolve the moment students log in.

On the question of perception, the verdict was strongly positive. Students described the scavenger hunt as enjoyable and motivating, contrasting it explicitly with revision by reading or watching, which they found boring. The game-based format transformed the monotonous task of revising concepts and theory into something students wanted to do, consistent with wider evidence that gamification raises motivation in higher education. The study did not measure knowledge retention directly, and its qualitative, single-cohort design limits generalisability, limitations the author acknowledges openly. Yet the triangulated evidence paints a consistent picture: a persistent, low-bandwidth, 2D virtual environment can deliver a game-based revision activity that supports both self-paced and collaborative engagement, at almost no infrastructure cost.

The implications reach beyond Sri Lanka. As universities worldwide grapple with disengaged first-year cohorts and the well-documented second-year slump, in which motivation declines after the novelty of first year wears off and some students drop out entirely, the study proposes a concrete avenue for future research: whether virtual game-based revision activities could build students’ confidence and sense of support enough to carry them through that vulnerable second year. For now, the lesson is simpler and more immediately actionable. The barrier to collaborative, self-directed revision is not always a shortage of motivation or even of knowledge; sometimes it is the fear of being seen to fail. A browser-based world of anonymous avatars, hidden tokens, and shared puzzles was enough to lower that fear, and in doing so it turned silent classrooms into chattering ones. Sometimes the most powerful educational technology is not the most immersive one, but the most forgiving.

Subject of Research: Game-based collaborative revision using a 2D virtual world among South Asian IT undergraduates

Article Title: Designing a game-based collaborative revision in a 2D virtual world for South Asian IT undergraduates

Article References: Somaratne, P. (2026). Designing a game-based collaborative revision in a 2D virtual world for South Asian IT undergraduates. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1069. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02157-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02157-7

Keywords: 2D virtual worlds, game-based learning, collaborative learning, self-paced learning, Second Life, revision, Sri Lanka, higher education, psychological safety, avatars, Social Constructivism, self-regulated learning