The Use of Gaming in Nursing

After reading about gaming and how to incorporate it in the classroom I feel that it is a great technique to keep students engaged and involved in the class. I also feel that game would help students to recall things from their memory. Currently I have not implemented gaming into my classroom. In the pass I have used something called a Bell Ringer but that is the extent of games and most times students don’t like them because it is a pop quiz that could effect their grade as oppose to some fun game. Bell Ringers do require the students to review the material that was covered in the previous class session because it is a great possibility that it will be on a pop quiz. I like them because it requires the students to be organized and it requires them to study and not memorize material. Once students realize that they are going to have pop quizzes they are more likely to study.In the next 6 months I would like to use gaming in our nursing pharmacology class. Our students are required to take a state exam to get their nursing licenses and we hear back from previous students who have taken their state exam that there is a lot of medication on the test. I would like for our nursing department to develop gaming with maybe a fill in the blank so students are required to know the classifications of a drug as well as nursing interventions of what to do if the patient exhibits an adverse outcome. The hardest part is creating the game because there are so many drugs out on the market we would have to create them via each body system for example respiratory medication for one group and cardiac medications for another group. I could see this being a great learning tool while the students are learning a particular system such as renal they could also be exposed to renal medications using gaming. I perceive this would be a positive learning outcome for our students where they won’t memorize material but actually learn it.