Clinical Skills Team Awarded Spark Grant for Innovative Way of Teaching
The Clinical Skills team at the Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University was awarded a Spark Grant for Innovations in Medical Education from the Southern Group on Educational Affairs (SGEA).
FORT WORTH — Finding unique ways to teach students is paying off for the Clinical Skills department at the Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University.
The team was awarded a Spark Grant for Innovations in Medical Education from the Southern Group on Educational Affairs (SGEA).
The Spark Grant provides $1,000 in seed funding for innovative projects that have the potential to enhance the learning experience of medical students, trainees or faculty.
The grant also funded the development and implementation of the Clinical Skills cardiopulmonary escape room, which put students in a gamified scenario set in a fast-food restaurant.
As part of the award, the Clinical Skills team has been invited to present their findings at the SGEA regional conference in 2025. During the presentation, team members will share the results of pre-and-post surveys that students filled out that speaks to how effective the escape activity was.
“Just keeping the student’s attention is sometimes difficult,” said Sandra Esparza, M.D., Director of Clinical Skills at the Burnett School of Medicine at TCU. “This is a fun way for them to practice. They’re trying to be competitive with their classmates. So, it makes them think in a quick fashion, which is what medicine does.”
When awarding the Spark Grant to the Clinical Skills department, SGEA stated they believe this project has the potential to make a lasting impact on the medical education continuum.
The escape rooms are set up like your normal escape room, but it has a medical twist to it. Each clue has a medical scenario that must be solved to get to the next clue that will eventually solve the medical puzzle.
This gamification in medical education is having an impact on students. First-year medical student Marisa Fat sees the benefit of these escape room activities: “This one was really fun because it had a lot to do with medicine and it incorporated everything that we learned in class, and it was really engaging. I really enjoyed it.”