@Article{info:doi/10.2196/13028, author="Chon, Seung-Hun and Timmermann, Ferdinand and Dratsch, Thomas and Schuelper, Nikolai and Plum, Patrick and Berlth, Felix and Datta, Rabi Raj and Schramm, Christoph and Haneder, Stefan and Sp{\"a}th, Martin Richard and D{\"u}bbers, Martin and Kleinert, Julia and Raupach, Tobias and Bruns, Christiane and Kleinert, Robert", title="Serious Games in Surgical Medical Education: A Virtual Emergency Department as a Tool for Teaching Clinical Reasoning to Medical Students", journal="JMIR Serious Games", year="2019", month="Mar", day="05", volume="7", number="1", pages="e13028", keywords="serious game; surgical education; clinical reasoning; virtual emergency department; medical education", abstract="Background: Serious games enable the simulation of daily working practices and constitute a potential tool for teaching both declarative and procedural knowledge. The availability of educational serious games offering a high-fidelity, three-dimensional environment in combination with profound medical background is limited, and most published studies have assessed student satisfaction rather than learning outcome as a function of game use. Objective: This study aimed to test the effect of a serious game simulating an emergency department (``EMERGE'') on students' declarative and procedural knowledge, as well as their satisfaction with the serious game. Methods: This nonrandomized trial was performed at the Department of General, Visceral and Cancer Surgery at University Hospital Cologne, Germany. A total of 140 medical students in the clinical part of their training (5th to 12th semester) self-selected to participate in this experimental study. Declarative knowledge (measured with 20 multiple choice questions) and procedural knowledge (measured with written questions derived from an Objective Structured Clinical Examination station) were assessed before and after working with EMERGE. Students' impression of the effectiveness and applicability of EMERGE were measured on a 6-point Likert scale. Results: A pretest-posttest comparison yielded a significant increase in declarative knowledge. The percentage of correct answers to multiple choice questions increased from before (mean 60.4, SD 16.6) to after (mean 76.0, SD 11.6) playing EMERGE (P<.001). The effect on declarative knowledge was larger in students in lower semesters than in students in higher semesters (P<.001). Additionally, students' overall impression of EMERGE was positive. Conclusions: Students self-selecting to use a serious game in addition to formal teaching gain declarative and procedural knowledge. ", issn="2291-9279", doi="10.2196/13028", url="http://games.jmir.org/2019/1/e13028/", url="https://doi.org/10.2196/13028", url="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30835239" }