Play your way to the finals: An immunology board game project to teach Immunology to undergraduate students.

Abstract

Abstract It is a normal practice to use the last class day of class to review the course materials before the finals. Most of the time, all the students are seldom engaged and are not participating in these review sessions. It is important to engage the students and make the session more student-centered than the common instructor-centered ones. Here I describe the use of a semester long Immunology board game group project, as a tool to review the course material on the last day of the class. The board game project serves as a perfect learning tool to review the course material learnt during the semester in several ways. First of all, it helps all the students in the group to actively participate and be engaged in learning the concept assigned to each of the group. Secondly, since the students have to transform the board game of their choice to incorporate one specific concept of Immunology, they have to understand clearly and think deeply about the concept to come up with the details of the game, for example the board strategy, clues, game piece etc. Third and most importantly, to encourages creativity, teamwork and active participation of all students. I use this Board game group project for an upper division Immunology class with class size ranging from 24-28 students. On the day of the game, each group will play their game with their peers. Each group will design their board game to include a specific concept in detail. When all the groups (usually 4-5 groups for about 25 students) have played their games, most important concepts of the course material would be reviewed. More than 90% agreed that the Board game project helped them understand a given concept way better and that playing the board games before finals helped them tie up all the concepts well before the final exams.