Development of Game-Like Simulations for Procedural Knowledge in Healthcare Education

Since the eAdventure project was launched in 2007, one of its main application fields has been healthcare and medicine. It just looks like yesterday to us. Looking back over our shoulders, we cannot avoid feeling some satisfaction on the work done so far: seven different games and simulations produced in collaboration with organizations like Harvard Medical School and Mass General Hospital (multiple collaborations), the School of Medicine of the Complutense University, the Spanish hospitals 12 de Octubre and Clínico San Carlos… we’ve learned quite a lot on the way.

We’ve tried to summarize all the knowledge we’ve acquired as a group in one single publication: Development of Game-Like Simulations for Procedural Knowledge in Healthcare Education, to be published in the near future in the JCR indexed journal IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. It is neither the first or the last of our publications in this topic, but it is the most important so far because it is based on the experience of many of the researchers of our group. In this paper we detail EGDA (Educational Game Development Approach), the methodology we follow to design, implement and evaluate serious games in the medical domain with the experts in the field, which is the result of combining our expertise with cutting-edge research conducted by other groups. Besides, we summarize the experimental results achieved so far, which prove that the games developed are great educational tools, plus a discussion on the cost of producing those games, which shows that the games developed are several orders of magnitude below the leading titles of the sector.

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