Seterra Anatomy and Science Quizzes

2021 (ongoing)

Lecturers
Students

Medicine & Nursing

Autonomous learning
Classroom Context

English

English

B1
B2

Game

Vocabulary

Writing
Reading
Mediation

The resource is game-based, visually appealing and can become competitive and challenging among students if combined with time options. It can be adapted to different levels of English, from intermediate to advanced, depending on the students’ previous technical knowledge. It can be used as an individual activity, a homework task or within a more global or specific learning unit, bearing in mind a specific technical field of medicine, nursing or other health sciences. Autonomous learning is possible and easily achieved, because this is a visual and motivating alternative to usually boring and long lists of words students have to memorise.

An example of how this resource could be used in a step-like sequence that increases in complexity would be as follows:
1. As a warm-up activity to motivate interest and increase engagement, on the quiz website the lecturer selects part of the anatomy to be explored and students will learn more about, for example, the skin, the brain etc. It would make more sense to do a quiz on such an area of anatomy that would be part of a module that will later focus on one or more of these areas of anatomy so as to provide opportunities to better visualize, contextualize, understand and recognize words/expressions.
2. The lecturer can project the visually appealing quiz onto a large screen and ask the students to respond to the questions. There are nine modes to play a quiz, so the lecturer can start with a mode which makes it easier to successfully complete the quiz. For example, the ‘drop down menu with autotype’ mode only needs one letter to be typed in the field for options to appear, including the correct answer. Students may be called upon individually to give the right answer, or could work in small groups (2-4), the latter increasing confidence for a competitive activity. However, the ‘Pin’ mode is more difficult, and students have to drag and drop the word on the right location. This activity is also colour-coded, so a correct answer in one click is white, a correct answer in two clicks orange and so on. Outside of the classroom, students can increase autonomy and knowledge by going through the quiz again, using different modes that vary in level of difficulty. An alternative to the lecturer directing the activities, students may be asked to work on their computers or mobile phones – either individually or in groups – and to explore the various modes.

3. The lecturer could then move on to providing students with sentences and /or dialogues in written form which provide a different context for using the words focused on in the quizzes. These could be cloze texts, either of a more academic nature (an abstract or article) or a dialogue. For the latter, for example, a senior doctor might be explaining aspects of the anatomy to a junior colleague. The students would need to complete the texts accordingly.

4. A more communicative approach to further consolidate vocabulary acquisition would be to role play the preceding dialogue, with the senior doctor pointing out the location of the words on the anatomy as they say them. Roles can then be reversed.

5. If considered appropriate by the lecturer, the students could then be asked to explain the function of various parts of the anatomy.

These guidelines can be helpful when using the resource as a vocabulary builder for a homework activity or as an introduction to a specific didactic unit.
Students are asked to visualise the different body parts/systems and the application in itself will motivate the correct labelling of the components, like bones, allocating a score at the end of the task, taking into account not only the adequate labelling, but also the time it took. A scroll down menu on the left-hand side bottom will allow a differentiated approach to the same exercise: a quiz, a multiple choice approach and more. Thus, the same visual material can be used with different kinds of exercises.
Step 2 – From the skeleton system the students can proceed to the muscle system or another, depending on the didactical unit the lecturer is lecturing at a specific moment.