A board game for undergraduate genetics vocabulary and concept review: the pathway shuffle.

“Play is hard to maintain as you get older. You get less playful. You shouldn’t, of course.”

INTRODUCTION

As any student in an undergraduate genetics course can attest, it is a challenging subject. Genetics has a vocabulary built upon, but distinct from, other biology domains (e.g. “recombination distance”), reducing the leverage of previous knowledge available to students. The field is also quantitative and requires excellent problem-solving skills. The former concern of fluency is troublesome, because in order to understand problems, such as on an exam or in research, one must first be able to comprehend the question being asked. Anecdotally, in working through problems with students one-on-one, it became clear to the author that the vocabulary hurdle was often the root difficulty. As reading comprehension of genetics-specific content improved for individual students, so did grades.

Beyond the classroom, as our students graduate and leave college, they will read about and critically evaluate many new discoveries. Outside professional concerns, they will also need to grasp the impact on their personal lives as genetics becomes central to medicine (1, 2, 5, 6). Indeed, genetic testing is mainstream with some commercial efforts being approved by the FDA (http://www.fda.gov/medicaldevices/productsandmedicalprocedures/invitrodiagnostics/ucm330711.htm) and tests being documented by the NIH through the Genetic Testing Registry (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gtr/). Being able to comprehend the vocabulary surrounding advances in the field of genetics is a necessity for majors, non-majors, and undeniably all of us.

As a review aid for fundamental concepts and vocabulary in genetics, the author developed a trivia-based board game: The Pathway Shuffle. Board and card games are not new to college-level pedagogy (3, 4, 7, 8); however most involve reuse of existing games, and none that were identified applied to genetics. The activity targets undergraduates in the lecture portion of a genetics course. It is easily prepared and takes approximately 45 to 60 minutes of classroom time. It can be easily applied to other purposes with a change of trivia cards, sets of which are available online (http://www.rit.edu/pathwayshuffle).

PROCEDURE

Required materials

The board, instructions, pathway cards, and trivia cards are provided as Supplemental Material. For each table you will need at least one page of colored (red, green, blue, and yellow) cardstock for pathway cards, one page of white card-stock for trivia cards, four “tokens,” two dice, and possibly several rubber bands. If printing the board as quadrants, you will need tape and a cardboard or other firm backing.

Instructor guidelines

Printing, cutting, and assembling materials requires a one-time investment of approximately one to three hours. The board is ideally printed on a color printer. Alternatively, each quadrant could be printed on a different color of card-stock. If printing as quadrants, they can be taped together on a cardboard backing. Pathway cards should be printed on color cardstock and should be cut out individually. Trivia cards can be readily modified to fit your specific course needs. Two instruction sheets per table usually suffice for four players. Tokens and markers can be easily acquired as glass beads or small toys, available from many retailers, craft stores, or online teacher supply vendors. Standard six-sided dice can be used, although other shapes (4-, 8-, 10-, or 12-sided) add to the novelty of the experience, without compromising game play, and are readily available through local hobby shops or online retailers. The author assembles materials for each board in large (> 1 gallon) food storage bags for easy setup.

It works best if students are arranged in groups of three or four if possible. If student teaching assistants or former students are available, they make good fill-in players as necessary; it also provides beneficial review for them.

In addition to practicing key vocabulary, the pathway cards present an opportunity to discuss the complex interplay between genotype and phenotype. Each pathway card names one gene in that pathway, as well as one human trait associated with mutations in that gene. What students can discover is that each gene in a pathway can have different traits associated with it, and a single trait may be caused by mutations in multiple pathways and genes.

CONCLUSION

Field conditions

The game was field tested in an undergraduate genetics classroom of 27 students on the last day of lecture. Students were predominantly Biology majors, with five Chemistry students. One student was in second year, 15 were in their third year, and 11 in their final year. There were 15 female and 12 male students. These ratios are typical for previous iterations of the course.

The “short answer” portion of the final exam was used to compare performance with previous years. This section is worth 25% of the exam grade and is open-ended and composed of vocabulary and fundamental concepts taken from a common pool of questions, such as the following examples.

Which two nucleotides are pyrimidines?

What is the difference between Penetrance and Expressivity?

For an STRP in humans, the population frequency of alleles 8, 9, and 10 are respectively 0.25, 0.6, and 0.05. What is the probability that an individual is homozygous for the 10 allele?

Students showed a dramatic improvement from previous iterations of the course (Table 1). The mean was 22.2 (n = 18), compared to 16.0 (n = 113) for the previous three course iterations (p < 0.001). Final exam scores had a small but non-significant increase from the previous three sections (mean of 69.0 vs. 64.9 previously).

TABLE 1.

Score out of 25 on the final exam short-answer portion by term. The tested term was fall 2013.

Term	2010 Spring	2011 Spring	2012 Spring	2013 Fall
Short Answer Mean (SD)	15.1 (6.0)	16.9 (5.5)	16.1 (6.7)	22.2 (5.3)
Overall Mean (SD)	66.3 (15.7)	65.9 (13.6)	62.4 (21.2)	69.0 (24.9)

SD = standard deviation.

Pending future trials, the board game appears to have had a meaningful impact on student performance. While it is certainly not a complete cure to the challenge of mastering the language of genetics, it can be one piece of the solution. Additionally, the game was an engaging and entertaining experience for students, with minimal preparation required for implementation in future classes. Suggestions for improvements to the game, especially regarding trivia cards for genetics or other subjects, are welcomed by the author.

Appendix 1: Pathway Shuffle board quadrants

Appendix 2: Pathway Shuffle full board and pathway cards

Appendix 3: Pathway Shuffle instructions

Appendix 4: Genetics trivia cards