Students had to complete 5 activities (eg, attend a review session, help another student understand a concept, participate in 4 days of resistance training, create a PowerPoint presentation) in a row (horizontally, vertically, or corner-to-corner) to achieve bingo. The game consisted of 25 squares organized in 5 horizontal and 5 vertical rows. 3 The bingo game, designed for students in a required exercise physiology course, encouraged regular and consistent student interaction with course content. Sutterluety recently described using a bingo game to decrease student procrastination. Although most students pass the course, students do not seem to retain the material for application in upper-level courses. This “test-to-test” culture has a negative impact on class attendance, 2 with students frequently cutting class, especially before and after examinations in other courses. Students admit that they wait to study for the course until just before examinations because most of their time is spent on “high-stake” courses (higher credit courses with more frequent examinations).

1 The course objectives are listed in Table Table1. The Introduction to Clinical Pharmacy Skills course is designed to provide the foundation for the first 2 outcomes from the Center for the Advancement of Pharmaceutical Education (CAPE) pharmaceutical care patient care-centered outcomes (ie, pharmaceutical care and communication skills).

Other required first-professional year courses include Physiology I and II, Fundamentals of Immunology, Biochemistry/Molecular Biology I and II, Microbiology, Pharmaceutical Calculations, and Introduction to Communication students typically take 15-17 credits per semester. Approximately half the class (about 130 students) takes the course each semester. The Introduction to Clinical Pharmacy Skills course is a required 2-credit first-professional year course consisting of two 50-minute class periods in a large lecture hall setting and one 50-minute small group recitation/laboratory per week.

Classroom bingo student