Tonight I watched the ASMCUE recorded session entitled “IMMUNOLOGY! A Board Game to Learn the Immune Response,” presented by Alicia Cecil, Mary Gobbet, and Emma Wade. This is a board game Cecil created with colleague Gobbet and student Emma Wade. They mentioned the game is adaptable to other topics. Cecil teaches clinical microbiology at the University of Indianapolis. Primarily, Cecil has pre-nursing and allied health students. The students play in the “CELL lounge” which is a place they can do manipulatives and reinforce lab concepts on their own time. Cecil and colleagues have added retrieval practice to the game. The game uses a Sorry Game board they have edited to include an “infection” spot. You also need cards: sorry cards you can find online. You also need the game “pawns.” All these items can be purchased online or edited and produced. This game is based on Sorry, and the object is to get all the names from start to finish by drawing cards and responding questions. One modification is that they use four different colors, and each color represents a different component of the immune system. Students answer questions about the immune response and must correctly respond to move the spaces. They can either have humoral or cell-mediate responses based on a roll of dice. As an instructor, you need to get the Sorry cards and include a star on 26 of these cards so that when a student draws a card it corresponds to a question in the list. You can include more components by adding different colors of pawns. Each player has four different pawns, and each color corresponds to a different immune system component. Students receive the instructions to play the game and learn as they play. Importantly, Cecil emphasized the questions can be modified and other biological processes can be integrated into this board game strategy. Cecil explained that you keep the board and modify the questions and color scheme, if needed. I think this would be fun and I wonder if there is an outbreak-related game we can use next semester!
