Table Rounds: Gamifying Med Ed, ft. Paulius Mui, MD

How Gaming Can Help You Learn Medicine Better

TL;DR

Rote memorization is part of medical education, but drawing deeper connections between concepts is what makes you a physician.

Medical school emphasizes finding the correct answer, but when you begin to practice medicine you’ll find that the answers are much more complex than that.

Although moving from med school to residency can be scary–as with any transition–Paulius found it to be easier than he expected.

Dr. Paulius Mui is a first-year family medicine resident in Virginia, and a long-time listener (since before med school!). He wrote to Dave not long ago because he had published a game called Table Rounds. It’s a game he and his friends in med school had made up, and now he’s working to bring it into the world as an actual product.

Paulius sent Dave a copy of the game, and M1s AJ Chowdhury, Alex Belzer, Nolan Redetzke, and M4 Joyce Wahba play the game. Players use cards–each with a medical term or concept on it–to draw connections between them. The connections can be deep or they can be spurious, but if you can make your case you’re a winner. But perhaps more importantly, it’s a game that you can make your own, coming up with rules that make it even more interesting and helpful.

Paulius also gives his advice to Joyce, who’s about to start her residency in Emergency Medicine, and discusses his first-year as a resident beginning while the pandemic raged.

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