Professor creates board game to help people find their niche in the laboratory
Keeping a laboratory running smoothly takes a team with an array of strengths, but not everyone contemplating a career as a medical laboratory scientist recognizes how to determine which roles fit them best.
Division of Medical Laboratory Sciences Assistant Professor/Clinical Brittany Teeter, MS, CLS, MLS(ASCP)CM, has taken the challenge of highlighting the variety of roles in a laboratory and turned it into a game.
“A lot of folks don’t know what they can do with an MLS degree,” Teeter said.
In her role on the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) Centers for Disease Control Workforce Grant Committee project, Teeter was part of a team that created a job aid tool to help medical laboratory leaders identify tasks and responsibilities that align with their team members’ individual interests and personal traits. The overarching goal of the project is to address the national shortage of medical laboratory professionals, Teeter said.
“We have that lack of awareness and visibility,” Teeter said. “A lot of people don’t know it is a viable career.”
Even though the paper-based tool proved to be a popular download, Teeter believed it would be even more useful as an interactive tool available online.
“The paper job aid I felt was too limited,” she said.
So, she suggested putting a game spin on the material. Enter Escape the Lab, a board game Teeter developed and presented on behalf of ASCP at the Association for Diagnostics and Laboratory Medicine conference in Chicago in July.
The job aid Teeter and her fellow committee members initially developed laid the foundation for the game, which Teeter will present in November at the ASCP 2025 Annual Meeting in Atlanta. For now, there are just two copies of Escape the Lab, with plans to demonstrate it at multiple conferences to gauge interest in making it available to a broader audience.
The object of the game
The game is structured much like a real lab, Teeter said.
Players roll dice to move around the board, draw challenge cards when they land in a lab room and collect lab badges for correct answers. The ultimate goal is to collect a badge from each of the four departments — hematology, blood banking, chemistry and microbiology — and make it to the end of the game before the timer runs out.
Along the journey, players encounter pitfalls that mimic real-world lab scenarios, such as Lab Errors, Contamination Zones and Lost Samples, and they have the option to take on roles such as leader, coder/gamer, introvert, extrovert or lifelong learner to leverage their own unique game advantages, such as re-rolling dice or earning bonus moves.