Can you remember the best lecture you ever attended? I can! It was interactive, involved audience participation, and we all fell about laughing. That emotional response also helped me retain all the content of the lesson – even years later.
The more we understand about learning styles, the more creative we can be with teaching. And the great thing is, in the age of generative AI, we can bring creative ideas to the classroom in seconds.
This is a philosophy adopted wholeheartedly by Matthew Cecchini – Pathologist at London Health Sciences Centre, and Associate Professor at Western University. Here, he shares his work in developing educational games.
How did you become involved in pathology education?
As a pathology trainee, I became involved in some educational activities, including planning one of our national meetings in Canada – and I've been doing it ever since. As an associate professor, teaching is part of my job. But it's also something I enjoy and am passionate about.
I actually think education is a great space for research and development. It can be difficult to bring new ideas into clinical practice due to the high bar for approvals. If I'm using AI to help train someone, I don't need to go through the regulatory hoops involved in clinical applications. It becomes a kind of flywheel where I road-test tools to educate people, and then adapt and improve them to apply to research.
What inspired you to develop games to assist learning?
My mom is a kindergarten teacher. She's a firm believer that we learn the most during those formative years when we're learning through play. And I agree. As an adult, education becomes way too serious. When you're sitting in a lecture theater, listening to one voice regurgitating facts, it can feel more like a lesson in trying to stay awake!
But if you think back to when you were four years old and learning how things work while you played, you were probably learning at an accelerated rate compared with now. And that's because the learning was hands-on, you felt engaged, and you had an emotional response to the activity.
If you're interacting with the materials and having fun while learning, it allows you to learn more efficiently than if you're sitting passively trying to memorize a bunch of things. So why not continue that approach into higher education?
Does your interest in game-based learning reflect your personal learning style?
I certainly tried to use varied methods to help me memorize content – but it was very low tech. I was a big fan of flash cards – always carrying around a set to pull out if I had to wait in a line. That way I turned waiting time into learning time.
That also served to inspire my game creation. We often have short spaces of empty time available, when most people will take out their devices and scroll through Facebook or watch TikTok reels. But that way, you're just burning dopamine and getting quick hits of nothing. So I think you can use that same approach to dead time, by turning to your cell phone, but make it valuable.
This is why I decided to develop electronic games for short, targeted educational activities, which might be more useful than sitting alone with a textbook for hours.
What’s the science behind learning through play, as an adult?
There is evidence from social learning that game-based learning can be a much more effective way to teach people – especially adult learners. We don't learn as well from didactic lectures. For example, there are a lot of webinars being made for pathologists to aid continuous development. But people just use it like the radio – they switch one on while they're sitting at the desk signing out cases, not giving it their full attention, and not really learning anything.
If you look at the other content that we ingest in our lives, it's all short form, targeted things. I think moving our education to a similar model is actually way more impactful, because most people lack the attention span to keep focused on a passive process for an hour. We can end up not retaining anything.
I believe it's time to change our whole approach to education, because the hour-long lecture model is not the most effective.
How do those principles manifest in your teaching practice?
I was never a big fan of the traditional didactic lecture approach, and so I try to push back on that teaching model. I actually have a "no PowerPoint" rule for my own teaching sessions. Instead, I teach with a variety of approaches, some of which are game-based.
Sometimes we use figma – it's an interactive whiteboarding application that's widely used in the tech space, but we adapt it to map out something in pathology. Starting with a blank figma, we start connecting pieces and then collaboratively build it in the lecture. It's cool because everyone can participate via their phone or laptop and the session shifts to a more active space.
Recently, when teaching lung pathology to our residents, we tried out a meme-based session led by one of our senior residents, Katherina Baranova. We still reviewed all the content, but then we challenged them all to make memes that related to lung pathology. They absolutely loved it, and are more likely to remember the pathology because they had to switch on their creative brains to come up with inside jokes about pulmonary pathology and micro papillary patterns and so on. I bet all those residents will remember that for the rest of their lives.
Tell us about some of the games you’ve developed
One of the first was a PD-L1 trainer app. PD-L1 tests are really difficult to assess, because human eyes and brains are not really geared up for it, so it helps to have some training in visual estimation tasks.
The idea of the game is to visually estimate thePD-L1 score. Players make their way through a series of rapid-fire tiles, score points, and work up the leader board – think Duolingo, but for pathology. It's a fun, reward-based game that also teaches pathologists the skills they need for PD-L1 scoring.
We also have a social IHC card game, developed in an international collaboration with other pathologists round the world. Each player has a set of physical cards with different IHC stains on. Opponents try to guess each other's IHC stain by asking questions about its characteristics. It's fun and competitive, but also teaches people to engage critical reasoning skills when analyzing stained slides.
I also use AI tools to build games. Molecular Pathology Pac-Man is based on the traditional video game, but you score points for guiding your tumor variant Pac-Man to its corresponding rearrangement ghost. It's the equivalent to memorizing molecular fusion rearrangements via flash cards, but in a more visual and fun way.
Similarly, I made a game based on Space Invaders, with the aim of shooting the alien fusion that matches your tumor gun.
How does generative AI help with educational game creation?
It's worth noting that I'm not a coder. But I can create a game in 15 minutes – from concept to sharing on social media – just by telling an AI tool what I want.
Fundamentally, the hottest coding language right now is English! Or your native tongue. Because, with generative AI, you just need the ability to write prompts.
I use Claude Code from Anthropic to create games, simply by telling it what I want. It might go through a few iterations and refinements from the first attempt, but eventually Claude comes back with something that works, and it takes just minutes.
I also find that generative AI helps me foster my creativity. If I have to deliver a presentation, I can now add interesting animated visuals – say Mario wearing a lab coat and using a microscope in a platform game – that are AI-generated.
Are you a gamer? What’s your favorite game?
I really liked playing video games as a kid. I would get up early, before my parents, and spend hours playing Super Mario. And I think there was value in that; it taught me about problem-solving, curiosity, persistence, and negotiating failure. After all, life is like a game: there are rules to follow, and you try to score points and gain small wins. There are just different rules of engagement!
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