Title

Kaboom! Blowing Up the Nurses’ Station with Fun, Interactive Clinical Education

Biography and Credentials

Eugenia Long, RN-C, BSN, IBCLC

Eugenia is an experienced obstetrics and maternity nurse and lactation consultant. One of her

main passions is educating and empowering staff nurses to provide excellent lactation assistance,

day and night. Eugenia shifted her focus from patient education to clinical staff education after

seeing the motivation of staff nurses to provide accurate, evidence-based and consistent patient

lactation education, and how this motivation contrasted with how difficult it was to recruit staff

participation in traditional learning experiences.

Measurable Learning Outcomes

 Identify three benefits of interactive games over traditional presentations for education of

clinical staff.

 Describe how you would use an interactive learning strategy in your own clinical or

academic practice.
 Instructional Methods

 Podium presentation

 Accompanying PowerPoint slides

 Kaboom! interactive game for session attendees to experience firsthand

Identified Gap

The knowledge gap to be addressed in this presentation is how to make clinical staff

education fun and interactive. How do we get staff to not only show up, but pay attention?

Clinical education should be less pedantic and more peer-to-peer, less formulaic and more fun,

less routine and more motivating. By reviewing evidence-based research into active learning

techniques, describing the case study in this presentation, and exploring other active learning

techniques, educators will leave the presentation with a deeper understanding of active learning

techniques and why engaging learners is so important. Attendees will also brainstorm how they

can utilize active learning in their own teaching practice.

Nurse Education Focus

The nursing education focus of this session is Teaching Strategies.

 Abstract Text

Kaboom! Blowing Up the Nurses’ Station with Fun, Interactive Clinical Education

Nurse educators often face difficulty overcoming issues with compliance and motivation

(Bastable, 2014). For hospital educators, this can mean wrangling busy staff nurses to take part

in educational updates as well as finding ways to engage their attention so that true learning can

take place. Active educational strategies can increase both learning and satisfaction (Boctor,

2013). Still, many hospital educators administer education via lectures or handouts, collecting

signatures and checking boxes without assessing that real learning has taken place. By making

clinical staff education fun and exciting, educators can increase participation as well as true

learning; however, many educators may be unaware of the gap between the provision of

information and its receipt by the learner.

One technique that proved successful on the postpartum units of Mount Sinai Hospital

was the use of Kaboom!, a free interactive gaming platform which allows educators to build

quizzes and participants to play in real-time via their smartphones. Learners play against one

another, gaining points for both speed and correctness of answers. A Kaboom! game focused on

breastfeeding issues in the first 48 hours of life was created and nurses were recruited to play,

with rewards of candy for correct answers. In addition to increasing engagement and motivation,

the fast-paced nature of a competitive, interactive game mimics the environment in which nurses

must think critically to survive and thrive (Petit dit Daniel, Raby, Ravaut, and Rothan-Tondeur,

2013). The activity took approximately 15 minutes of employee’s time, similar to what a

traditional in-service requires of them. Nurses reported greater satisfaction with the educational

session compared to traditional in-services, and attended voluntarily with near-total compliance.
Most importantly, nurses retained the information learned and changed the information they

delivered to patients, improving accurate patient education and enhancing patient experiences

and outcomes.

The results of this clinical education technique suggest that tapping into educators’

creativity and focusing on active, interactive learning techniques can increase both compliance

with clinical staff education, as well as increase the achievement of learning outcomes. This

case report will be presented along with a Kaboom! game for session attendees to participate in

an experience firsthand, and other methods of active learner engagement will be explored.

References

Bastable, S. (2014). Nurse as Educator. Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett Learning.

Boctor, L. (2013). Active-learning strategies: The use of a game to reinforce learning in nursing

education. A case study. Nurse Education in Practice, 13(2), 96-100. doi:

10.1016/j.nepr.2012.07.010

Petit dit Daniel, O. J., Raby, T., Ravaut, F., Rothan-Tondeur, M. (2014). Developing the

Serious Games potential in nursing education. Nurse Education Today, 33(12), 1569-1575. doi:

10.1016/j.nedt.2012.12.014