Pathogen Pursuit: A Gamified Format to Learn Infectious Diseases and Antimicrobial Stewardship for Medical Residents

Game-based learning in medical education has emerged as a preferred format for learning complicated topics. At our institution, infectious diseases has been found to be a challenging topic for learners, making it important to find an engaging method to teach this topic. We designed a gamified approach to teach infectious disease management and antimicrobial stewardship for internal medicine resident education.

In our gamified learning session, participants played a 60-120-minute game with the goal of treating various pathogens. Participants earned Antimicrobial cards, representing common antimicrobial treatments, by correctly answering challenging infectious disease questions, and then matched the Antimicrobial cards to Pathogen cards, to select appropriate treatments for each infectious disease pathogen or organism while also learning about antimicrobial stewardship. Participants completed a postgame assessment using a Likert scale to gauge satisfaction. Knowledge retention was assessed by a pre- and postgame five-question test.

Thirty residents participated in the session. Resident response to the game was positive, with many comments noting its engaging utility to learn such complicated topics. All participants agreed or strongly agreed that the educational objectives were met and that the format of the game encouraged participants to be engaged. Pre- and postgame five-question analysis showed a 28% increase in mean knowledge scores postgame.

Our gamified session was received as an engaging way to learn about complex and complicated infectious disease treatment topics for residents. Our evaluation demonstrated participants were able to a recall information that was covered during the game.