Designing a serious game about critical appraisal of medical literature for pregraduate students

Abstract

Critical appraisal of medical literature is a crucial step in the evidence-based-medicine practice, especially for pregraduate medical students who used to deal more with background questions than with patients’ health problems. Using serious games seems to be attractive in order to link between a serious purpose, which is handling a health problem and gaming. The authors aimed to describe the process they adopted in order to develop, without a game developer, a serious game dedicated to third-year-medical students. All the steps of the process design were described. Besides, they performed a pilot study in order to assess the students’ satisfaction using a think aloud process and a likert-scale questionnaire and aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the process by comparing pre and post-tests scores.