Games and "fun learning activities" have always annoyed me. I always found them condescending, pointless wastes of time. Even in primary school. Although I draw a distinction between a crossword puzzle of medical terminology and actually educational activities, like wearing low vision glasses to put yourself in the shoes of the visually impaired.
Besides, good teachers don't need to rely on educational gimmicks. They recruit your interest with thought out and insightful lessons. Some of our lecturers could speak for hours without a single aid and we'd hang on every word. Others could have dancing girls and helicopter gunships and we'd still cut their class. You're better off putting effort into crafting an interesting and engaging lesson than worrying too much about fun activities (not that they can't also be part of it). I do a little teaching myself and we've done some work at uni on educational techniques so here are a few things from that:
-Powerpoint should augment a lesson, it shouldn't teach it. Animations, diagrams, pictures. I use a lot of videos off you tube as well. If you spend some time looking, you can find some excellent professionally made instructional videos as well as showing real life examples (I'm showing a video of a heroin overdose next week). It breaks up the talking, and reinforces your point. Linking ideas visually works tremendously well. Breaking ideas down on whiteboards during powerpoint augmented lectures is also a good way to mix up the lesson a little.
-Don't try to make the powerpoint slides into class notes. A lot of our lecturers do that. All that means is that you end up with class notes that aren't detailed enough and powerpoints that are too detailed.
-Plan your lesson. What are you trying to achieve? Its not enough to say, "Chest trauma...okay so...um.. here's a picuture of a chest...can..um.. anyone name a way in which you could get injured in the chesrt" then list patterns of injury for 2 hours. You need to figure out what you need them to be able to do, then work back from there. You must write learning objectives to guide your own development of the lesson and to show them what they need to get out of it.
-Review and reframe ideas during the lecture to repeat concepts without sounding repetitious. One of my lecturers is fond of joking, "When you're making a presentation, you've gotta tell them what your ganna tell them; tell them;tell them again in a different way; then tell them what you've told them"
-Here's some stuff on teaching clinical skills from our education lectures:
Simple 4 step approach:
Demonstration: Trainer demonstrates at normal
speed, without commentary
Deconstruction: Trainer demonstrates while
describing steps
Comprehension: Trainer demonstrates while
learner describes steps
Performance: Learner demonstrates while they
describe the steps
-Teaching methods in order of most affective to least affective in terms of information retention on the part of the student:
Teaching others, Practice by doing, discussion group, demonstration, audiovisual, reading, lectures. Note that lectures are the least affective. The more you can work the better teaching methods into your lesson, the better. Discussion groups are really good. Eg. Having people break off into groups and debate the management of a particular patients then present their consensus to the other groups.
If you can do these things well, all the fun, medically themed crosswords in the world won't be more engaging to your students.