Two rooms and a boom is a social deduction game. Players receive cards and are secretly assigned to the red or the blue teams. Among the red members, a bomb; among the blue members, the president. Players are then divided in two rooms. Rooms can exchange members after discussion three times. If, at the end of the third turn the bomb and the president are in the same room, the red team wins. Otherwise, the blue team wins.
A game-based learning experience that can be assessed
To assess the pedagogical effects of two rooms and a boom, inspired by chess puzzles, I developed special assessment sheets. The sheet assessed language usage with the goal of solving a game-play related puzzle.
Problem
Although a junior high school’s board of education wanted to introduce engaging, communicative English activities, teachers were concerned that these activities could not be evaluated through paper-based tests and would not prepare students for examinations.
Solution
To address this problem, I adapted the game Two Rooms and a Boom and created assessment sheets that translated game-play puzzles into language-based tasks, requiring students to use the target language to express solutions.
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I scaffolded the game rules, introducing new rules only after players had mastered the previous ones.
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I used an interactive PowerPoint to elicit the target language during play.
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I defined the main language goals together with the teaching staff, both in terms of communicative use and exam preparation.
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I designed game puzzles that could only be solved by players who understood both the gameplay and the target language.
The project was implemented during weekly English classes, with assessments conducted on a monthly basis.
The process
The solution was developed through a prototyping and refinement cycle, allowing for iteration and reuse across implementations.
Scaffolding Rules
I planned a schematic scaffolding of the game complexity to be based on the level of mastery each class presented. For the first iterations only had the minimum number of rules necessary for the game to happen.
Once learners mastered the base game I planned to present a set of extra rules every month.
To give learners a sense of "ownership" of the game, after two new rules I create a selection from which students could, through voting, choose which new rule they want to implement.
Embedding Game-play and Goals in assessments
Inspired by chess puzzles I created assessment sheet that only who know the game can solve. They are impossible to understand for someone who does not know the rules no matter their English level. Low level speakers who know the rule, however, can solve them. The embed and require the usage of modal verbs in the answer which is the language target established by the class teacher.
Takeaways and Feedback
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Assessment can create engagement instead of ending it
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In many classrooms, assessment marks the end of engagement. The activity stops, the energy drops, and students shift from participation to performance. Framing the assessment as a puzzle changed that dynamic. Because the task preserved the logic of the game, students approached it as something to solve rather than something to survive.
The evaluation did not feel detached from the experience that preceded it. It required attention, recall, and reasoning, but within a familiar structure. As a result, students remained active during assessment instead of becoming passive. The shift was subtle but visible: more discussion, more hypothesis testing, and less visible anxiety about “getting it wrong.”
This experience suggested that assessment does not have to interrupt engagement. When the structure of evaluation mirrors the structure of play, it can sustain the same cognitive and social momentum rather than shutting it down.
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