The Zoom Picture Book Game: A Creative Way to Promote Teamwork in Undergraduate Medical Education

Abstract

Effective team building and leadership are crucial in running an effective and safe healthcare system with improved patient care and clinical outcomes. Currently, there is a great demand for formal leadership training throughout the extensive medical education curriculum. We constructed an interactive team-building activity utilizing gamification-theory with the Zoom game. The Zoom activity requires a team of learners to organize a set of sequential images, each of which contains a "zoomed out" section from the previous image, into the correct order within a set time frame. Given the unique and approachable nature of this team-based activity, we propose the following: 1) to introduce the Zoom game as a team-building and communication fostering exercise in undergraduate medical education and 2) to assess baseline teamwork skills of first-year medical students through an immersive gaming experience. With this in mind, 260 first-year medical students (class of 2020) at an urban-city medical school were enrolled in the Zoom Team Building Activity as part of their orientation. The students were randomly assigned to 11 teams, comprising 23-24 students and two faculty facilitators per team and completed the activity in the allotted time frame. The average time to complete the Zoom game was 24 minutes, and all the teams successfully placed the pictures in the correct order. Facilitators noted that the Zoom game strongly encouraged friendly interactions, intercollegiate high values, mutual respect, confidence, and trust among each other. Students observed take-home points such as selecting a leader, designating specific roles, and encouraging closed-loop communication. Overall, the Zoom activity game is an interactive, fun, and easily accessible team-building and communication fostering exercise in undergraduate medical education. Further studies on the Zoom game exercise would be essential to determine whether it has a continuous and enduring effect on developing team building among medical students.

Leadership Training and Undergraduate Medical Education: a Scoping Review

“…Competency Category [20,. But, a number of existing or validated tools (n = 11) were used, including the Ottawa Crisis Resource Management Global Ranking Scale [39], FourCe-PITO Framework Assessment [40], Jefferson Teamwork Observation Guide [41], Kornives LID [42], the Medical Leadership Competency Framework (MLCF) [43], Kirtpatrick's Four Levels of Evaluation [21,43], and the Kane-Blates Leadership Survey [44]. Further, we classified verbal evaluation (n = 4) to include interviews and focus groups, formal evaluations (n = 4) to include quizzes, a course grade, or faculty evaluation, and those which were considered "other" (n = 3) included course evaluations, other quantitative data, or an intervention which did not have results to report at the time of publication.…”

Are you ready to play Pathology Pyramid? An exploration of an alternative method of learning through gaming in pathology resident education

“…A study using a team-based game model in which medical students described a series of pictures to other students who could not see those images in an attempt to place them in a sequential order, endorsed that the most valued benefit of the activity was teambuilding through descriptions and communication, a skill of utmost importance in the medical profession. 8 …”

“…Several studies in internal medicine, surgery, and family medicine residency programs have seen a positive influence of the gamification of curriculum elements, 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 including enjoyment and increased trainee satisfaction with the introduction of games to the curriculum, as well as showing promise of knowledge retention and academic success. Multiple medical education settings, in which gaming has been implemented, have been able to excel in building confidence, team performance, 7 , 8 and positive reinforcement and collegiality, 9 regardless of said games’ efforts to improve knowledge base or retention. This highlights that gaming in medical education has multiple facets in which it can be deemed successful and beneficial.…”

A mixed-methods analysis of a collaborative online international pharmacy course

“…There is also an emerging activity of direct collaborative teaching under the so-called Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) framework (Rubin, 2017). The potential for expansion of this activity has been promoted by the increased familiarity with online teaching in most countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Burges & Sievertsen, 2020;Stefanile, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020;, but exposure of pharmacy students to the education and healthcare systems of other countries through didactic courses is rare. However, there are a few examples of international didactic courses in pharmacy co-taught by partner universities.…”