Implementing Educational Game in Pharmacy

Abstract

Educational games are a teaching strategy that allows students to examine various parts of a game as a method of learning. These are games meant of severe purposes instead of just entertainment. Through their design, education games allow students to gain new skills and knowledge, arouse physical activities, and enhance social-emotional development. Educational games require learners to participate in competitive activities with preset regulations. The objective of this study was to obtain pharmacy students’ satisfaction and perception towards educational game implementation in the classroom setting. The author implemented a prospective study design that involved first-year pharmacy students at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University (PNU). All the students who took part in the study were implementing this type of education for the first time. Thirty students were placed into two teams of 15 and took part in a jeopardy game. All the students were satisfied with the educational game. Key benefits of the game as noted in the study findings include improved cognition functions like memory and reasoning, promoted mental stimulation, learning was better and faster, improved concentration, recall, and thinking, resulted in motivation and more engagement with the team members, resulted in timed responses that were similar to real-life, promoted immediate scoring and there was no need to wait for the outcome, and the learning environment was quite fun. The study can be useful in designing educational games for use in pharmacy courses.