Inter-Twine-d: Combining Organic Chemistry Laboratory and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Games

Remote delivery approaches to laboratory courses in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic have included a spectrum spanning passive options such as providing students with prerecorded videos of experiments to replacing in-person laboratory experiences with immersive virtual reality environments. While interactive activities that require students to make choices about experimental design or procedure, mimicking levels of inquiry present in in-person laboratory experiments, are preferred, creating custom activities of this type often require expensive equipment, a media production team, and knowledge of multiple programming languages. The open source, nonlinear storytelling platform, Twine, provides a free alternative that allows instructors to create custom interactive choose-your-own-adventure activities based on their existing laboratory curriculum and inclusive of text, images, and video clips. We used Twine to create a choose-your-own-adventure laboratory activity as the final experiment in a remote delivery format organic chemistry laboratory course that allowed students to obtain customized data based on their experimental choices. We expanded this work to create an entire course of Twine choose-your-own-adventure laboratory activities for a third term organic chemistry laboratory course. ©

The utility of simulation in preparing the healthcare workforce for providing CPR during medical emergencies in the COVID-19 pandemic

Background and aim: Healthcare workers (HCW) are at increased risk of developing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Providing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to a COVID-19 patient is an aerosol-generating procedure. Guidelines for personal protective equipment (PPE) use and providing CPR to COVID-19 patients have been developed locally for the purpose of improving patient and HCW safety. Medical simulation is used to educate HCWs. We aimed to the determine the utility of COVID-19 CPR simulation in improving HCWs ability, confidence and knowledge in managing medical emergencies. Methods: 108 HCWs participated in a standardised 1-h moderate-fidelity CPR simulation designed and delivered in the medical simulation laboratory at our tertiary metropolitan hospital in Sydney, Australia. Participant-filled surveys were collected pre and post-simulation. Data was categorised into assessment of perceived knowledge, confidence and ability in PPE use and providing CPR using a 5-point Likert scale. Statistical analyses were performed using the Mann–Whitney U test. Results: Of 108 participants, 94 were doctors and 14 nurses. The mean subjective scores of confidence in providing CPR pre and post-simulation were 2.3 and 3.9 respectively (p < 0.001);perceived ability to provide CPR pre and post-simulation were 2.5 and 4.0 respectively (p < 0.001);confidence in PPE use pre and post-simulation were 3.1 and 4.2 respectively (p < 0.001);perceived ability in PPE use pre and post-simulation were 3.3 and 4.2 respectively (p < 0.001) (see Fig. 1). Adequate knowledge of specific elements of newly developed guidelines improved from 14% to 97% of participants pre and post-simulation. Conclusion: Our study shows that during the COVID-19 pandemic, simulation of medical emergency scenarios is a valuable tool in improving knowledge, confidence and perceived ability of HCWs in PPE use and providing CPR in medical emergencies where real-life experience may be limited. Inadequate preparation before encountering real-life scenarios in COVID-19 patients may compromise the safety of both patients and healthcare workers.