Using a Twine-Based Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Interactive Story to Increase Student Content Engagement in Health Sciences

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Technology in Health Professions Education (Table 8)

Abstract

Educators have used gamification to increase participant/student engagement with content across several professional education fields, including law, medicine, and business, but little in allied health. One type of gamification uses interactive storytelling, where choices made by the participant directly affect the storyline they experience. Twine is an open-source software that is primarily used to create interactive, online, text-based stories, in the style of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (CYOA) book. Our pilot study explored the student user experience for students interacting with a Twine-based CYOA medical laboratory sciences story. Participating students reported the story was engaging (100%) and were happy with how their choices impacted the storyline (89%). Eighty percent of respondents believed future students should play the story to aid in learning.

Authors

• Carol A. Carman, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

• Sarah Burnett-Greenup, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

• Diana Riddle, University of Texas Medical Branch