A Murder Mystery Gamification Session to Consolidate Analytical Biochemical Techniques Learning

Gamification has a strong track record of improving student
engagement
and learning in the chemical sciences. Meta-analyses of different
approaches to gamification have highlighted that providing a game
fiction, encouraging students to work in teams, and breaking games
into smaller “quests” are particularly effective. Here,
we aimed to increase students’ engagement and learning with
four analytical biochemistry techniques (high-performance liquid chromatography,
sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, Western
blot, and mass spectrometry) by creating a game that required them
to use every method to solve a “murder mystery”. Our
game was based on the popular games “Mafia” and “Among
Us” and introduced an original game fiction relevant to our
setting. Students attending the formative gamified session gave highly
positive feedback. They indicated that they enjoyed the session and
increased confidence in the methods involved. Free text comments praised
many of the elements deliberately introduced into the game. To our
surprise, the main criticism was that the session was not challenging
enough. We developed a revised session that required students to undertake
more detailed data interpretation, which students reported gave the
expected increase in difficulty. All materials and code for running
our session and generating new mysteries with original data are available
online.