Use of an interactive teaching program to teach medical workers, about MUMPS programming.

The MUMPS computer language is widely and increasingly used for medical applications. It is useful for medical students and others in the medical environment to have an understanding of such languages that can help them perform their jobs well. The author is therefore making available an interactive teaching program to instruct such people in the MUMPS computer language. Use of the teaching program is reported for 19 novice MUMPS programmers and compared with results for two experienced programmers. Free-text comments by the novices emphasize areas in which they had difficulty. There is a considerable variation in the mean time taken by the novices to answer the questions, and in the number of questions repeated because of erroneous answers. Most novices found the teaching program very helpful. A copy of the Standard MUMPS teaching program and the QUEST driver on which it is based has been sent to 24 institutions, including six in Europe and one in Japan, for further use.