Learning Biochemical Biomolecule's Structure and Nomenclature by Using Words Games

Games are fully accepted by students, as they stimulate memory, activate reasoning capacities in brain, improve the knowledge and keep out the stress. Our innovation teaching group is interested in using games for teaching Biochemistry of the Chemistry degree. Most of the individual games found in Internet are classified in numerical games (sudoku, calculation games, a grid to paint black squares depending on the file and column numbers, …) and word games (anagrams, crossword puzzles, word search puzzles, connecting dots, mazes, labyrinths, matching two sets, amidakuji, logic games, or knight's tour games). Biochemistry books often contain glossaries and word index, and usually students must learn many difficult words, including biomolecules. In Chemical degree, it is important that students also know the structure of these biomolecules. In this work, we present some examples of chained-words games. Some of these games can be difficult to prepare, as most of the biomolecules end in -ose (most carbohydrates), -ase (most enzymes), whereas not many biomolecules begin with e-. Thus, domino games can be a good option to learn two aspects of biomolecules: structure and nomenclature. Dominoes tiles contain two zones (one with a structure of a molecule, and the other with the name of another molecule). Student must fit the structure of one molecule with its name, thus learning both structure and name. Depending on the dominoes, this game can be played individually or in groups of students. The game was very appreciated by all our students. [For the full proceedings, see ED630948.]