PHARMAGAME: A COMPUTER GAME TO FACILITATE THE SELF – LEARNING OF PHARMACOLOGY IN HEALTH SCIENCES

In the European Union important changes in Higher Education have being carried out. One of the aims consists of increasing the involvement of students in the learning process by playing a more active role. To achieve this goal, different methodological strategies should be considered. In this way, the use of software programs has allowed important changes in the techniques of educational learning. Numerous tools based on software have been developed and they are efficient and feasible.
Although the achievement of competences (“to be able to do”) is the main objective of the actual education, the development of skills like the memory is very important to improve the speed of the resolution of problems. Sometimes, training memory skills is not an attractive task for the students. The study of certain aspects of Pharmacology in Health Sciences is one of these cases. These professionals often have to supply a rapid, secure and accurate solution to a specific health situation. So, it is very important to have attractive tools for the student motivation in the self-learning process of Pharmacology.

The aim of this work is to show a Computer Game implemented by us, easy to use and with a user-friendly interactive format, which helps in the memorization process of different characteristics of the most used drugs in Human Pharmacology. It will be very useful for the study of drugs in some areas of Health Sciences. The game will bring over the learning of hundreds of active principles and their characteristics to all the Science Health students, likes Medicine, Nursing, etc. Since self-learning of students will be motivating and easy.
In this contribution we present a web based on application which has used a specific software development technique for every software development phase: UML Rational Rose to capture functional and non-functional requirements, the Eclipse platform in the development phase, Flash interfaces to interact with users, plus MySQL and Apache technologies to support the data persistence and web hosting, respectively.
This set of techniques and technologies allow users all around the world to interact with the system by using just a internet browser with Flash support. The game allows to identify and to characterize all the active principle included in the database. The drugs have been classified in 14 anatomical different groups each of them has been divided in different pharmacologic subgroups as well. From each active principle, students can practice the following characteristics: side effects, drug administrations, adverse effects, contraindications and other observations. The game also allows the selection of three different levels of difficulty. Finally, the application shows the statistics Scores.
In our opinion, PharmaGame could be a very powerful tool to motivate and facilitate the hard task of memorization of pharmacologic drugs for all the Health Science students and this web application shows as a computer tool that could help to achieve better results in the educative process.