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. 2019 Mar 5;7(1):e13028.
doi: 10.2196/13028.

Serious Games in Surgical Medical Education: A Virtual Emergency Department as a Tool for Teaching Clinical Reasoning to Medical Students

Seung-Hun Chon  1 , Ferdinand Timmermann  2 , Thomas Dratsch  2 , Nikolai Schuelper  3 , Patrick Plum  1 , Felix Berlth  1 , Rabi Raj Datta  1 , Christoph Schramm  4 , Stefan Haneder  5 , Martin Richard Späth  6   7 , Martin Dübbers  1 , Julia Kleinert  1 , Tobias Raupach  8   9 , Christiane Bruns  1 , Robert Kleinert  1
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Serious Games in Surgical Medical Education: A Virtual Emergency Department as a Tool for Teaching Clinical Reasoning to Medical Students

Seung-Hun Chon et al. JMIR Serious Games. .

Abstract

Background: Serious games enable the simulation of daily working practices and constitute a potential tool for teaching both declarative and procedural knowledge. The availability of educational serious games offering a high-fidelity, three-dimensional environment in combination with profound medical background is limited, and most published studies have assessed student satisfaction rather than learning outcome as a function of game use.

Objective: This study aimed to test the effect of a serious game simulating an emergency department ("EMERGE") on students' declarative and procedural knowledge, as well as their satisfaction with the serious game.

Methods: This nonrandomized trial was performed at the Department of General, Visceral and Cancer Surgery at University Hospital Cologne, Germany. A total of 140 medical students in the clinical part of their training (5th to 12th semester) self-selected to participate in this experimental study. Declarative knowledge (measured with 20 multiple choice questions) and procedural knowledge (measured with written questions derived from an Objective Structured Clinical Examination station) were assessed before and after working with EMERGE. Students' impression of the effectiveness and applicability of EMERGE were measured on a 6-point Likert scale.

Results: A pretest-posttest comparison yielded a significant increase in declarative knowledge. The percentage of correct answers to multiple choice questions increased from before (mean 60.4, SD 16.6) to after (mean 76.0, SD 11.6) playing EMERGE (P<.001). The effect on declarative knowledge was larger in students in lower semesters than in students in higher semesters (P<.001). Additionally, students' overall impression of EMERGE was positive.

Conclusions: Students self-selecting to use a serious game in addition to formal teaching gain declarative and procedural knowledge.

Keywords: clinical reasoning; medical education; serious game; surgical education; virtual emergency department.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Sample screenshots of EMERGE. Students could freely interact with the environment.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Testing declarative and procedural knowledge before and after working with EMERGE.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Percentage of correct answers by semester before (blue) and after (red) playing EMERGE. Error bars represent 95% confidence interval of the mean. PY: practical year (11th and 12th semester).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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