Effects of a mobile game on students' learning achievements and motivations in a clinical chemistry course: learning style differences

Abstract

Clinical chemistry has become an essential topic for medical technologist students to perform an authentic clinical laboratory. Therefore, it has been suggested to situate students to experience various clinical chemistry situations. Recently, it has been a common recognition that educational games can motivate students' learning and help them acquire knowledge by participating in gaming scenarios. Since there are only a few digital games in clinical chemistry, this study proposes a mobile game to simulate students in a clinical chemistry laboratory and implement the game with 155 university students on the clinical chemistry course. The results revealed that the mobile game could trigger knowledge acquisition and enable students to analyse internal quality control data, leading to less anxiety for performing clinical chemistry assessments. Moreover, the impacts of the mobile game on the learning achievements and motivations of the students with different learning styles were investigated and found that visual and verbal learning styles yielded positive results during participating in the mobile game.