Building bacterial knowledge: Games as teaching aides for higher-order thinking skills

Bacteria Builder is a videogame designed to teach student nurses about bacterial form and function within the context of a university fundamental science module. It challenges players to design and build bacteria with appropriate structures for surviving in different environments. This paper describes two studies undertaken to explore the most effective way to use the game as part of teaching on the module. 152 student nurses took part in the first evaluation, which used a control group to compare learning gains for a) only the game b) only the lecture and c) the game plus a reflective activity. All three conditions demonstrated improvements over the control, but there were no significant differences in learning gains between the experimental conditions. In a second evaluation, 124 student nurses took part in a study which compared the lecture on its own to the lecture and game together. Learning gains were found to be over 50% higher in the lecture and game condition, and subsequent analysis showed that the nurses who had played the game made greater improvements in questions designed to test higher-order thinking skills. The design and motivation behind the Bacteria Builder game is described and the results of these studies are discussed with respect to the role of teaching in maximising the effectiveness of game-based learning. Correlations between interaction data for different parts of the game are explored with respect to learning outcomes, and implications for the design of future studies are discussed.