Abstract:

Creativity and engagement is a major pillar in the successfull mastering of complex tasks especially in the medical field (e.g. pharmacy) where graduants deal with the lives of people. With the tough discipline and huge information need to be learnt, the medical discipline become non-encouraging carrier except for those students who are enthusiastic to be a health professional. However, with ordinary students the discipline becomes debilitating and mandates high level of striving.
A growing body of research indicates that mobile technologies can be effective tools in catering to digitally-hooked students and there are signs of the motivating potential and possible learning gains of games played on mobile devices with young adult audiences.
With mobile game-based learning medical students can use the interactive and entertaining format of the games to creatively tackle complex medical cases. By enabling students to continue to play through levels, competitive learning can be encouraged using repetition, rewards, and challenges.
Most games use social dynamics or real-world contexts to enhance game play, and this can be integrated into the natural flow of instruction more easily than their big-screen counterparts, creating educational and engaging environments for learners. Additionally mobile games can be designed at a much lower cost than traditional PC or console games.
Computer science, information systems, and educational research contribute to knowledge on mobile learning games. As is typical for information systems research, this paper strives to discuss these areas in an integrated way with more emphasis on the educational aspects. Differences between computer-based and mobile-based games were discussed. The paper also presents antimicrobials as an example for mobile-based, game-based interactive educational tool for pharmacy students especially antivirals. It discusses project plan for this example which covers pedagogical framework of the game-based software in order to systemically control the educational outcomes mastering.

Keywords:

Medical education, mobile-based games, edutainment.