An Educational Game Evening for Medical Residents: A Proof of Concept to Evaluate the Impact on Learning of the Use of Games

Abstract

Insufficient knowledge of bacteria and antimicrobials leads to the emergence of multidrug-resistant-bacterium infections. Diversification of the teaching forms, such as the use of games, could be a solution. We organized an event around 3 games (Bacteria Game, KROBS, and Dawaa) to collect student feedback on the evening and assess their knowledge before and after the evening using multiple-choice questions. The preliminary results suggest a positive effect of this event, but due to the low number of participants, we see this report more as a proof of concept to assess the impact of games on the learning.

Keywords: educational games; evaluation; feedback.

FIG 1

Boxplots of feedback from the residents specializing in infectious diseases and microbiology (n = 15) who answered the feedback questionnaire. The feedback questionnaire consisted of the following 3 questions, to which residents could give an evaluation on a score of 1 to 7. “Does a serious game evening contribute to your educational training?” “Would educational games be relevant to accompany the diploma training days, through dedicated sessions?” “How would you rate this evening overall?” Each boxplot corresponds to one question and represents the scores of all residents.

FIG 2

Paired scores for the Q-go and Q-return questionnaires of the participating residents, who specialized in infectious diseases and clinical microbiology (n = 15). Positive and negative changes are represented in red and blue, respectively. We considered as True Positive (TP): items checked when they were right; True Negative (TN): items not checked when they were wrong; False Positive (FP): items checked when they were wrong; False Negative (FN): items not checked when they were right. The scores, expressed as percentages, were obtained by the following formula: (((TP + TN) − (FP + FN))/(total number of items)) * 100. The scores of the paired Q-go and Q-return questionnaires of the residents were compared using the Wilcoxon test with R software (12). With this test, we observed higher scores for Q-return than for Q-go questionnaires (P = 0.002).