Gamification in Education

The challenge in the current teaching and learning process of most medical and health sciences courses is the dependency on memorisation and factual recalling. This tends to lead to poor learning experience and environment that does not challenge students’ critical and creative thought processes. Gamification and game-based learning are approaches that motivates student’s learning through engagement via video game design and game elements and has been used in variety of settings. The use of gamification and game-based learning in medical and health sciences courses is therefore an avenue worth exploring. Our group created a gamification module in toxicology and several toxicology game-based learning with the aim to provide a paradigm shift in the teaching and learning process in toxicology. These modules consisted of various toxicology topics with over 20 different games in total. In each topic there are several modules and each module is packed with important controlled parameters. These parameters includes, the games’ objectives, instructions and explanations, duration, materials needed and number of required players for the games, skills, challenges, achievements and rewards. Besides, each module is accompanied with layout diagrams to ease the players and the facilitators to follow the instructions of the games.

Moreover, the games are revised thoroughly and suggested implementations are also included so that the games can be conducted in a conducive manner. From our observation, throughout the gamification and game-based learning, students learn from each other and collaborate, fostering peer-to-peer learning and team building. Creating teams nurtures a sense of healthy competition and increases recollection under pressure. They solidify their individual learning by processing information from short-term to long-term memory. Gamification and game-based learning allow students to feel ownership over their learning and introduces healthy competition to uncover intrinsic learner motivations and provides a more relaxed environment in which learners can expose knowledge gaps in a non-threatening platform.