Medicine box challenge

The Medicine Box Challenge and its associated tasks are designed to encourage collaborative working; offer experience of multi-tasking and working to deadlines; and to help students learn about medicines, their effects and how they are administered.

The whole activity requires a minimum of two hours, but should ideally take place over the course of 4 hour-long lessons.

Before the activity, you may wish to encourage students to use the information on pages 2 - 4 to research drug absorption in the body. This will prepare students well for the first part of the task.

In addition to the main task, we have provided one further task on excipients which can be used as a follow up exercise. We have also provided the questions and answer sheets from the main task as standalone tasks, which can be used as shorter activities where required.

This is the core task for the module. The ultimate aim is for students to carry out a full 'production run' for the packaging of a new medicine.

• To produce a significant number of boxes to be used as packaging for a new medicine.
• To carry out a production run in a fixed time period and achieve a target set by the team.
• The team with the most points and bonus points will win the contract.

For the student:

• To develop team working skills;
• To experience working to deadlines;
• To experience working on multiple tasks to achieve a common goal;
• To develop decision making skills;
• To develop accuracy and quality control skills;
• To set challenging targets and achieve them.

Students will appreciate:

• That the labelling of medicines is important;
• That the correct dosage schedules are crucial;
• That instructions for patients must be clear and accurate;
• That high quality of a production run is usually more important than high quantity;
• That there are four important factors that need to be known about a medicine:
  • does it work?
  • is it safe?
  • how much do you take?
  • how often do you take it?

In optional extra activities students can learn about all the different ways of giving medicines in a group discussion exercise with written feedback. A quiz on facts about medicines and the body is also available. These activities can be either stand-alone or used to add "stress" during the production run.

Other optional activities are for the teams to make a presentation about the design of their box label, branding and design for advertising.

Follow-up work can cover a survey of what ingredients are in medicines found at home or in shops and an investigation about what each ingredient does.

Guidance for teachers can be found in the Medicine Box Challenge Teacher Notes, which can be downloaded from the link below. The manual also includes references to all of the other downloadable resources available below, and how they can be used throughout the lesson.