An Escape-Room about Krebs cycle prepared for Chemical Students

Abstract

Games are excellent teaching tools for self-learning. Students playing a game enjoy themselves and at the same time learn basic and important concepts. Different games including crossword puzzles, word search puzzles, knight’s tour games, connecting dots, mazes, matching two sets, amidakuji, and logic games were used for continuous assessment during the confinement due to pandemic. These games were developed as part of the GINDO-UB180 teaching innovation group activities. Since these games were very successful, we decided to combine all of them and construct a new teaching activity, that would help our students to study one essential metabolic pathway: The Krebs cycle. This activity (https://forms.gle/BPvpnLQRNYNPxcLQ7) is an Escape-room, and it was recently tested by our students in a General Biochemistry course. The code of the Escape room after the game is a word: either the longest in the letter soup, an anagram from several boxes from the crossword puzzles, the sentence from the knight’s tour game, or a word obtained following a maze. The results obtained after carrying out the Escape room will be compared with those obtained using previous tasks in terms of assessment and acceptance by the students in order to be included in the future as self-evaluation activities.