Stealing their beer time: turning studying for medical progress tests into a social game

Many health education programs use progress tests to evaluate students’ progress in learning and to identify possible gaps in the curricula. The tests are typically longitudinal and feedback-oriented. Although many benefits of the progress test have been described in the literature, we argue that the acclaimed facilitation of deeper learning and better retention of knowledge appear questionable. We therefore propose an innovative way of presenting both the test itself and the study process for the test: a real-time-strategy game with in-game challenges, both individual and in teams. In this conceptual paper we provide a brief overview of the benefits and challenges of progress testing and illustrate how gamifying the process of both the assessment and preparatory work taps into many aspects that educators would like to promote in their students’ learning outcomes and behavior. We then argue why and how we aim to create a pilot version of a progress test game for medical and allied health students. For the development of this game, six tracks are proposed, that will run mostly in parallel in an iterative process, using design-based research as a framework.