Students’ Perceptions of an In-house Developed Multiplayer Online Role-playing Serious Game for Learning of 21st Century Skills – a Cross Sectional Study

Background: An in-house serious game was developed to train pharmacy students in 21st century skills. Players work collaboratively a “choose-your-own-adventure” format find cure for humankind post-apocalyptic fantasy world infested by zombies. Our objectives were determine if the would enhance student learning of skills an engaging way, and whether could replace or supplement traditional teaching methods professional training curriculum. Methods: A self-administered questionnaire obtained information about participants’ demographics, gaming interests, frequency, experiences preferences; game’s role its A pre- post-quiz conducted test on knowledge. Descriptive statistics, Friedman two-way ANOVA, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, Mann-Whitney U used analysis. Results: Participants preferred three-dimensional first-person view, modern setting, authentic hero-adventure storyline, collaborative nature gameplay. Majority felt that trained them performing pharmaceutical calculations (27/30, 90.0%), patient history-taking recommending appropriate medications (24/30, 80.0% each). indicated they learnt more counselling (mean rank = 3.95) compared other skills, such as 3.02, p 0.002), applying drug from monographs 2.95, 0.003), pharmacotherapy drugs 2.37, < 0.001), extemporaneous preparation 2.72, 0.001). agreed should not curriculum (≥60.0%), but face-to-face sessions (90.0%), extemporaneous/compounding labs (73.3%) lectures (60.0%). Conclusion: Pharmacy perceive our is able health communication (patient history taking counselling) calculations. With implementation, this has potential become useful supplementary tool help achieved students.