Clinical parasitology education in Sierra Leonaa game experience approach

Resumen

Malaria is one of the leading causes of dead among children young than 5 years in Sierra Leone. To tackle this devastating disease, an open-access serious game was developed to facilitate students to acquire com-plex diagnostic skills to recognise Plasmodium species pivotal for rapid and accurate diagnosis of malar-ia. The e-Parasitology Game Collection© app presents three mini-games: Mosquito Town Defence (to learn prevention strategies); Symptom Game with Microscopy (to learn clinical symptoms and investigate blood samples for diagnosis); Microscopy Standalone (to learn clinical diagnosis). The game was tested with a combination of undergraduate BSc Public Health and postgraduate MSc Public Health students at the University of Makeni in 2020/21. Participants attended a specific workshop, and voluntary provided feedback. 90.2% reported that the virtual blood smears available were suitable for learning diagnoses; 86.8% highlighting these slides enhanced their learning of diagnostic skills. Thus, the game helped them to learnt Plasmodium species morphological features (86.8%) to distinguish between them (83%). The e-Parasitology Game Collection© could facilitate the teaching and learning of complex diagnostic skills for diagnosing malaria and would be an appropriate free resource to promote the learning of these skills in universities with limited resources. This new app may also aid to tackling the issue of misdiagnosis of emerging zoonotic diseases in the Sierra Leonean health system