Prompt: Write about your game experience and connect it explicitly to teaching and learning, as well as principles of and research about multimedia that you are aware of to date.
I would not consider myself a gamer. My game experience comes from playing Frogger on my parent’s Atari, Duke Nukem on the old family PC circa 1988, or the original Nintendo I had growing up in my pre-teen years. I recently uncovered my old Nintendo from my parents’ storage shed and I have had a blast sharing Duck Hunt, Super Mario Bros., and Dr. Mario with my kids! Yet, my gaming days ended in the ’90s.
In my current career as an Instructional Designer, we will sometimes design educational modules using game-based learning, or gamification. I, personally, have mixed feelings about gamification in education; especially in graduate medical education which is the industry in which I work. I recently led a seminar on Teaching with Technology during our recent Academic Boot Camp for our new faculty members, and while I discuss gamification, I suggest using it sparingly.
Kahoot! is a common and easy form of gamification in the classroom. Kahoot! is a program that many students and teachers are very familiar with and often get excited when the addictive Kahoot! melody begins to play. At the root of the program, Kahoot! is a basic group quiz. There are a series of multiple-choice questions, true/false questions, etc. and the students earn points for the correct answers they buzz in on their mobile device or computer. The faster the student buzzes in the correct answer, the more points they receive. At the end of the quiz, there is a celebratory end screen announcing the winner. It’s quite fun. Yet, Kahoot! is primarily geared toward K-12 education and thus should be used sparingly in graduate education.
As mentioned, I work at a graduate medical university and therefore we are always excited to discover innovative examples of medical learning. One of the great examples of gamification in medical education is Septris, which was created by Stanford University. The online Septris game provides a gamified approach to “early sepsis identification and application of evidence-based management (best practice) and evidence-based guidelines.” The students navigate through interactive patient scenarios and try to save the patient before the patient gets sepsis and dies. It is a quick game that forces medical students to think on their toes and allows them to test their knowledge in a safe environment. Septris is an innovative and gamified learning tool for medical students. (https://septris.stanford.edu/)
Gamified learning can be exciting and faculty can be quick to implement it into their course. My advice is to use it sparingly and be sure that the game aligns with your course’s learning objectives. If the game distracts from the learning, or if it’s just the “cool new thing,” that is not a good reason to implement the game activity. The game needs to have value within the course and enhance student learning.
