Abstract
Practical training in refrigeration and air-conditioning depends on access to equipment, and vocational workshops rarely have enough of it. At the Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Workshop of Sungai Buloh Vocational College a single Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) unit serves an entire class, so structured observation found that only six of 30 students were actively engaged at any moment while the remaining 24 waited their turn. This action research evaluated the HVAC Escape Room, a teacher-built gamified activity of five rotating stations covering component identification, a crossword code-breaker, piping-route sketching, a video quiz and a hands-on pipe-measurement task, designed to convert waiting time into structured learning. Thirty Diploma students took part in one Kemmis and McTaggart action research cycle. Twenty-four students completed both a 20-item pre-test and an equivalent post-test, and a ten-item perception questionnaire was administered afterwards. Mean scores rose from 12.17 to 18.30 out of 20, a gain of 6.13 marks or 30.65 percentage points, while the median rose from 12 to 19 and the minimum score rose from 6 to 11. Perceptions were uniformly positive, with an overall mean of 4.60 on a five-point scale, highest for enjoyment and lowest for systematic task completion. Because the design used a single intact group with no control group, no inferential test and no delayed post-test, these results describe change within one cohort rather than establishing a causal or durable effect. They nonetheless suggest that a low-cost gamified activity can make productive use of unavoidable waiting time in equipment-constrained workshops.