Serious Games for Students in Healthcare

Serious games for health are educational tools that are immersive and engaging for the learning expectations of the net generation or those students born after 1980.. Utilizing a serious game as a learning medium is advantageous for a number of reasons. Firstly, the factor of immersion and the engagement of the learner in the simulated environment play a vital role in the retention of information and, ultimately, the transfer of this learning to a ‘real world’ practice environment. Moreover, processes in the games provide the learner with opportunities to make decisions, learn from those judgments, and receive immediate feedback to correct an incorrect response or reinforce the correct one. With the skills and confidence gained in a gaming environment, learners are able to enhance their learning outcomes in health care practice, competence, and patient safety.

Serious games for health are effective, not only because they allow students to practice in a realistic clinical environment, but also because students can do this repeatedly until they meet the required level of competence. In repeating the game or level the learner can deepen existing knowledge and potentially acquire new learning every time the game or level is played, depending on the capacity of the game. Beyond what is learned from the content of the serious game, serious games also foster the development of many other skills, including visual, tactile, psychomotor, and spatial skills.

Although the literature supports the use of gaming as a pedagogical tool for the current generation of students, the lack of research about the learning outcomes that can be achieved and the cost of production are major barriers to the design and development of games by educational institutions. The researchers and the students named on this site are exploring innovative ways to use and evaluate the pedagogical implications of serious games in health care.