Students’ Perceptions of an In-house Developed Multiplayer Online Role-playing Serious Game for Learning of 21st Century Skills – a Cross Sectional Study

Abstract

Background: An in-house serious game was developed to train pharmacy students in 21 st century skills. Players work collaboratively in a “choose-your-own-adventure” format to find a cure for humankind in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world infested by zombies. Our objectives were to determine if the game would enhance student learning of 21 st century skills in an engaging way, and whether the game could replace or supplement traditional teaching methods in the pharmacy professional skills training curriculum. Methods: A self-administered questionnaire obtained information about participants’ demographics, gaming interests, frequency, experiences and preferences; the game’s role in learning 21 st century skills and its role in the curriculum. A pre- and post-quiz was conducted to test on participants’ pharmacy knowledge. Descriptive statistics, Friedman two-way ANOVA, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, and Mann-Whitney U test were used for analysis. Results: Participants preferred the three-dimensional first-person view, modern fantasy setting, authentic hero-adventure storyline, and the collaborative nature of gameplay. Majority felt that the game trained them on performing pharmaceutical calculations (27/30, 90.0%), patient history-taking and recommending appropriate medications (24/30, 80.0% each). Participants indicated that they learnt more about patient counselling (mean rank = 3.95) compared to the other 21 st century skills, such as patient history-taking (mean rank = 3.02, p = 0.002), applying drug information from monographs (mean rank = 2.95, p = 0.003), pharmacotherapy of drugs (mean rank = 2.37, p < 0.001), and extemporaneous preparation skills (mean rank = 2.72, p = 0.001). Majority agreed that the game should not replace traditional methods of teaching in the curriculum (≥60.0%), but should supplement face-to-face counselling sessions (90.0%), extemporaneous/compounding labs (73.3%) and lectures (60.0%). Conclusion: Pharmacy students perceive that our game is able to train on 21 st century skills, such as health communication (patient history taking and counselling) and performing pharmaceutical calculations. With appropriate implementation, this game has the potential to become a useful supplementary teaching tool to help enhance the learning achieved by pharmacy students.