Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 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
Affiliations

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.

PubMed Disclaimer

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

References

    1. Riedel WJ, Blokland A. Declarative memory. Handb Exp Pharmacol. 2015;228:215–236. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-16522-6_7. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Jayakumar N, Brunckhorst O, Dasgupta P, Khan MS, Ahmed K. e-Learning in surgical education: a systematic review. J Surg Educ. 2015;72(6):1145–1157. doi: 10.1016/j.jsurg.2015.05.008.S1931-7204(15)00139-7 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Fleiszer D, Hoover ML, Posel N, Razek T, Bergman S. Development and validation of a tool to evaluate the evolution of clinical reasoning in trauma using virtual patients. J Surg Educ. 2018 May;75(3):779–786. doi: 10.1016/j.jsurg.2017.08.024.S1931-7204(17)30534-2 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Chon S, Hilgers S, Timmermann F, Dratsch T, Plum PS, Berlth F, Datta R, Alakus H, Schlößer HA, Schramm C, Pinto Dos Santos D, Bruns C, Kleinert R. Web-based immersive patient simulator as a curricular tool for objective structured clinical examination preparation in surgery: development and evaluation. JMIR Serious Games. 2018 Jul 04;6(3):e10693. doi: 10.2196/10693. http://games.jmir.org/2018/3/e10693/ v6i3e10693 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Breckwoldt J, Ludwig JR, Plener J, Schröder Torsten, Gruber H, Peters H. Differences in procedural knowledge after a "spaced" and a "massed" version of an intensive course in emergency medicine, investigating a very short spacing interval. BMC Med Educ. 2016 Sep 26;16(1):249. doi: 10.1186/s12909-016-0770-6. https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-016-0770-6 10.1186/s12909-016-0770-6 - DOI - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources