Educator's blueprint: A how-to guide for creating analog serious games for learning in medical education.

Serious games are an emerging tool for teaching and learning within medical education. These games can be used to facilitate learning or to demonstrate complex concepts in short bursts of interactive learning. This educator's blueprint will provide 10 strategies for creating a serious game, focusing on card and board games. These strategies include creating a project charter; determining the nature of the game; establishing game mechanics; selecting the best medium; prototyping and playtesting; reviewing sensitivity to equity, diversity, and inclusion; reviewing and refining content; funding game development, manufacture, and distribution; marketing and publicizing the game; and future-proofing the game. This blueprint hopes to help aspiring serious game designers and educators to conceptualize the steps for successfully creating a new serious game for medical education.

Card and board game design for medical education: length and complexity considerations.

PURPOSE: There is growing use of games for health professions education. Card and board games are relatively easy to develop, effective for education, supported by educational theory, and generally well accepted by learners; yet, they remain relatively infrequently described in the medical education literature. METHODS: A questionnaire was developed to understand barriers to use of card and board games and to understand user preferences to inform their development. The questionnaire was offered to students and educators downloading a printable antibiotic card game online. RESULTS: The questionnaire was completed by 335 health professionals primarily by physicians, pharmacists, and their trainees. Participants described preferences for shorter games and games with lower complexity. Player counts in the two to four range were the most commonly desired. The most frequently cited barriers were lack of availability in desired subjects, cost, and concerns about content accuracy. CONCLUSION: Educators looking to develop or use serious card and board games should start with shorter, lower-complexity games. Methods to assure and demonstrate content accuracy for educational games should be explored by educators and researchers.

Cute Kid? Patient Obesity Status and the Use of Nonmedical Descriptors in Presentations by Pediatric Residents.

Nonmedical descriptors, adjectives that are not related to a medical condition, such as "cute," are often used in presentations in pediatrics. We hypothesize that patterns of their use may reflect obesity bias. Descriptors used by pediatric residents presenting cases of children <9 years in an outpatient clinic during the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 academic years were recorded. The primary outcome was the association of the use of positive nonmedical descriptors with children's obesity status using logistic regression. Positive descriptors were used in 14% of 994 presentations. Most addressed the appearance of the child with variations of "cute" and "adorable." There was no variation in use of positive descriptors by obesity status. On multivariate logistic regression, the odds of using positive descriptors were higher among female residents, and positive descriptor use declined with patient age. Negative descriptors were rare and often focused on weight.

Podcasting in medical education: a review of the literature.

Podcasts are increasingly being used for medical education, both within teaching institutions and on an international scale by major journals. To date, there are no evidence-based guidelines for the development of educational podcasts. To review the state of the literature, MEDLINE, SCOPUS, and ERIC were searched in May 2016 for articles describing audio format podcasts used in medical education. Eighty-four articles met inclusion criteria. A qualitative synthesis of the evidence was done using Kirkpatrick's model for evaluating outcomes. Twenty-four articles described reaction outcomes, eleven described learning outcomes, and one described behavioral outcomes. None measured patient impact. The literature demonstrates that podcasts are both feasible and accepted by learners. The mean length of reported podcasts was 18 minutes, which falls within the recommended range in at least one paper, and is consistent with reported listener preference. Interview format, clear disclosures, and accurate information were reported as desirable. There is limited evidence showing the efficacy of podcasts as teaching tools, or regarding best practices in making podcasts. More rigorous studies evaluating efficacy, changes in behavior, and changes in patient outcomes need to be performed in order to prove podcasts' value and to justify production costs.

Number needed to eat: pizza and resident conference attendance.

The didactic conference is a common part of the resident education curriculum. Given the demands of clinical responsibilities and restrictions on duty hours, maximising education is a challenge faced by all residency programmes. To date, little research exists with respect to how the provision of complimentary food affects physician and resident conference attendance. The objective of this study was to determine whether complimentary food improves resident arrival times and attendance at educational conferences and, furthermore, to test whether this provision is a potentially cost-effective tool for improving education. A retrospective review of 36 resident educational Friday noon conferences, including 1043 resident arrivals, was performed. Data were analysed for total attendance, arrival times, number needed to eat (NNE) and the percentage of residents arriving on time, and compared between days on which food was and was not provided. Median attendance was 3.7% higher (p = 0.04) on days on which food was provided, at a cost of US$46 for each additional resident in attendance. Arrival times were also statistically significantly improved when food was provided, with a median improvement of 0.7 minutes (p = 0.02) and an 11.0% increase in on-time arrivals (p < 0.001). The NNE was 10.6. Complimentary food improves both attendance and arrival times by a small, but statistically significant, degree. The provision of complimentary food can be considered as an incentive for attendance and on-time arrival at didactic educational sessions, although more cost-effective modalities may exist.

Data exploration tools for the Gene Ontology database.

MOTIVATION: To improve the ability of biologists (both researchers and students) to ask biologically interesting questions of the Gene Ontology (GO) database and to explore the ontologies by seeing large portions of the ontology graphs in context, along with details of individual terms in the ontologies. RESULTS: GoGet and GoView are two new tools built as part of an extensible web application system based on Java 2 Enterprise Edition technology. GoGet has a user interface that enables users to ask biologically interesting questions, such as (1) What are the DNA binding proteins involved in DNA repair, but not in DNA replication? and (2) Of the terms containing the word triphosphatase, which have associated gene products from mouse, but not fruit fly? The results of such queries can be viewed in a collapsed tabular format that eases the burden of getting through large tables of data. GoView enables users to explore the large directed acyclic graph structure of the ontologies in the GO database. The two tools are coordinated, so that results from queries in GoGet can be visualized in GoView in the ontology in which they appear, and explorations started from GoView can request details of gene product associations to appear in a result table in GoGet. AVAILABILITY: Free access to the GoGet query tool and free download of the GoView ontology viewer are provided to all users at http://db.math.macalester.edu/goproject. In addition, source code for the GoView tool is also available from this site, along with a user manual for both tools.