Designing Serious Games for Medical Education

Mark Childs,

Warwick Medical School

Outline

• Defining and distinguishing between games and simulations

• Designing these for education

• Some examples from medical education

• Issues important in design

What makes a game?

Effective games have:• Character role • Scoring • Emergent narrative • Responsive environment • Psychosocial moratorium

Need an understanding of what makes a game playable

Chris Brannigan, CEO, Caspian Learning: “The first academics want to do is to take all the fun out.”

Psycho what?

• The merging of action and awareness: • Clear goals and feedback• Concentration on the task at hand• The paradox of control• The loss of self-consciousness• The transformation of time

What makes a simulation?

Effective simulations:• Do not require narrative, character role, scoring• Do need:

– breadth of sensory information– Depth of sensory information– control of relation of sensors to environment– ability to modify environment– Perceptual feedback of changes

And – can be game and simulation

Learning from games

Four models of learning from games• transmission model (behaviourist) conveying

knowledge, drill-and-practice• user-centred model (experiential) exploring,

synthesising and constructing knowledge, • participation model, consider the “wrapper” for

the game, educational contextSimon Egenfeldt-Nielson, CEO Serious Games

Interactive, “a game is just an excuse for reflection”

• modding (de Freitas 2006; 20; Bungie 2007; 25)

Other game observations

• Meaningful play created by entering a “magic circle” (from Huizinga) where objects and events have a “second order reality” (Caillois)

• Engagement as well as immersion. Engagement is deliberate, reflective (from Carr) where text has a “second order reading”

Linking games and education

• Endogenous v. exogenous– Is the educational content appropriately

integrated with the gaming elements, or just bolted-on?

• Two most important questions– What aspects of the subject matter in

question already exhibit ludic features? – And how can a game designer exploit and

highlight these aspects?

Linking games and education

Is learning content?• Explicit within game• Implicit but made explicit through reflection• Completely avoidable

Simulations

Common uses of simulations

• Medbiquitous virtual patient models

• Triage simulation

Medical education in Immersive Virtual Worlds through

• transmission of information

• roleplay

Should focus on interaction not information

Interactive Trauma Trainer ref Human Factors in Defence Medicine

Ref Birmingham University

Virtual Healthcare ref Naval Research ref Birmingham University

Health care games

Made more difficult by

• knowledge imparted through non-verbal, non-textual engagement

• embodied reality involves all the senses

• critical situations may contain all manner of background sensory noise

• scalable implementation across diverse learning environments

Health care games

• Embedding made easier by use of narrative within the paper-based scenarios already used with students

• Situations already have game-like qualities (identifiable goal, time-dependent, narrative context)

Successful health games

• Appropriateness of the technology.

• Endogenous not exogenous.

• Engagement and immersion.

• Realness and embodiment.

A solution looking for a problem

• Good elearning design starts with the pedagogical issue and decides what is the most appropriate technology

• Therefore not only need to answer what can we use a game for? But …

• What is there for which a game is the most appropriate technology?