A Case Study: Nutricia & 3DforScience
We built a medical escape room that specialists couldn’t stop talking about
Nutricia needed to train nutrition specialists on two of the most complex metabolic conditions in rare disease — without lectures, without slides, and without a facilitator in the room. We designed Código Crítico: a 50-minute medical escape room where teams race against a live countdown, decode physical objects from a clinical suitcase, and make real treatment decisions for patients whose stories unfold in real time.
The Challenge
Nutricia needed to train nutrition specialists on two complex metabolic conditions — OTC deficiency and PKU combined with gestational diabetes — at a live event. The constraint: these are experts. Standard formats don’t move them.
The ask was simple. Make it unforgettable.
50 min
A fully autonomous experience — no facilitator, no slides, just a suitcase and a countdown.
2 clinical cases
OTC deficiency and PKU combined with gestational diabetes — running simultaneously in the same room.
10 probes per case
Every puzzle teaches one clinical concept. Every object in the suitcase has a reason to exist.
What We Built
Código Crítico is a 50-minute medical escape room for teams of specialists. No facilitator. No slides. Just a suitcase, an interactive Tablet, a countdown and two patients whose lives depend on the right clinical decisions.
Two parallel cases run simultaneously in the same room — each with a different patient, a different metabolic pathway and a completely different set of codes.
What We Built
Código Crítico is a 50-minute medical escape room for teams of specialists. No facilitator. No slides. Just a suitcase, an interactive Tablet, a countdown and two patients whose lives depend on the right clinical decisions.
Two parallel cases run simultaneously in the same room — each with a different patient, a different metabolic pathway and a completely different set of codes.
What’s Inside the Suitcase
Ten interconnected probes per case. Every object is a teaching tool.
UV-coded clinical vials. A Russian embassy letter in Cyrillic. Handwritten patient diaries. Amino acid card decks. A codon wheel. QR-linked product fichas. A sealed envelope marked Do Not Open Yet.
Every physical object connects to a clinical concept. Nothing is decorative.
The Technology Layer
A custom tablet app runs the entire experience autonomously — cryptic clues, answer validation, live scoring, automatic clinical alerts at precise moments, and a real-time leaderboard visible to all teams.
At minute 14 and minute 27, the interface changes color. The patient deteriorates. The clock never stops.
Emotionally crafted videos to introduce the atmosphere
Each case opens with a cinematic AI-generated video introducing the patient — a teenager at a birthday dinner, a biochemist hiding a dangerous secret — and closes with an emotional epilogue. The stories make the clinical stakes feel real.
What We Delivered
Scientific case conceptualization · Probe and mechanics design · All physical materials production · Tablet app UX specification · AI video production · Real-time scoring system · Organiser documentation · Portuguese product ficha translation
What We Delivered
Scientific case conceptualization · Probe and mechanics design · All physical materials production · Tablet app UX specification · AI video production · Real-time scoring system · Organiser documentation · Portuguese product ficha translation
Our workflow:
From concept to delivery
Each phase of Código Crítico was built around a single principle: every creative decision must serve a clinical learning objective.
We started with the science — validating two complete patient cases against current clinical guidelines for OTC and PKU management. From there, we designed ten interconnected probes per case, produced all physical materials, specified the tablet app experience, and created AI-generated narrative videos to open and close each case. Every element — from the UV-coded vials to the Cyrillic diary page — was tested to ensure it taught exactly what it was designed to teach.
The final outcome
Teams competed, debated and made clinical decisions under pressure. The debrief that followed was the most engaged part of the day.
“The format is reusable, scalable and travels in a suitcase.”
Nutricia
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