The biochemistry of metabolic pathways is an important component of pharmacy education.1 Biochemical pathways such as glycolysis, the tricarboxylic acid cycle, the electron transport chain, gluconeogenesis, triglyceride biosynthesis, and amino acid metabolism provide a basis for understanding the pathology of complex metabolic disorders, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Students who are successful in biochemistry spend significant amounts of time studying the metabolic pathways, eg, by writing them out individually and as part of an interconnected network. However, many students find this process to be tedious and difficult, and thus fail to adequately learn and apply the material. A board game based on an integrated network of core biochemical pathways was developed in an attempt to increase students’ learning enjoyment; familiarity with pathway reactions, intermediates, and regulation; and understanding of how individual pathways relate to one another and to selected physiological states.
Although the use of games in pharmacy education is widespread,2-9 there are relatively few references in the literature to games that have been developed to enhance student learning of metabolic pathways.10-13 Those that have been developed appear to be for general, undergraduate biochemistry courses and to emphasize the learning of intermediates and reactions, whereas features that may be more relevant to students in the health professions would include regulation of the pathways and their relationships to physiological events. The first report of a board game on metabolic pathways was for Metabolism, a game in which students “generate” adenosine triphosphate (ATP) by drawing cards that allow them to progress from one intermediate to another on a game board containing several interconnected metabolic pathways.10 The object of the game is to acquire the most ATP. Although the game was “enthusiastically received,” no data were provided about its effectiveness as a learning tool. In the game Which Pathway Am I?, a sheet of paper containing information about one of the metabolic pathways is attached to each student's back.11 The students form pairs and then ask one another yes or no questions to determine the pathway with which they have been labeled. A 10-question pretest and posttest indicated that there was significant improvement in the students’ ability to identify biochemical pathways as a result of playing the game. In Metabolic War, players compete to capture metabolic pathways one intermediate at a time, which students reportedly found helpful to their understanding of metabolic biochemistry.12Another reference was to an abstract for an online board game called Metabola, but this abstract did not reveal whether the game was evaluated with students nor did it describe how the game is played. Neither the online game nor its manual were available in English.13
This paper describes the implementation and assessment of Race to Glucose, a board game created to improve learning of the metabolic pathways by students in the first year of a doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) program.