A drug design themed escape room approach to enhance pharmacy resident learning

Escape room-based learning has shown promising outcomes in pharmacy education. This study aimed to describe the design and implementation of an educational escape room focused on drug design and to explore residents' knowledge improvement through pre- and post-test assessments, as well as their perceptions of the activity.

The educational escape room was developed and tested with 20 pharmacy residents who were divided into four groups of five. The escape room consisted of six sequential puzzles that addressed the principles of drug design, druglikeness rules, toxicity prediction, and biological targets, leading to an in silico study task. The session time was set at 55 min. A pre-test and post-test assessed knowledge acquisition, and a satisfaction questionnaire evaluated residents' perceptions. Pre- and post-test scores were compared using a Wilcoxon signed-rank test, and effect size was estimated using Cohen's dav for paired data.

All groups successfully completed the challenge, with a mean completion time of 50 min. Scores increased from pre-test to post-test (4.85 ± 1.31/10 vs. 6.80 ± 1.32/10; p < 0.001), with a large effect size (Cohen's dav = 1.48). Most of the residents were satisfied with the escape room, saying that they would recommend it to their colleagues. They reported positive perceptions of the escape room, particularly regarding its contribution to knowledge acquisition and its engaging and stimulating nature.

In general, the escape room approach aimed to reinforce residents' understanding of drug design concepts and in silico methodologies, promote active learning, suggesting its potential for broader application in pharmacy education.