Design of a serious game in training non-clinical skills for professionals in health care area

Abstract

Most educational games and training applications for health care professionals have been developed as simulation tools dedicated to the teaching of medical knowledge in a particular area. Non-clinical skills such as communication skills or knowledge about e-Health are insufficiently focused by such tools. A serious game with consistent educational objectives offers to the learner many possibilities to acquire multiple competences in a fun and engaging learning process. This paper presents a serious game composed with extensible educational modules that concentrate on providing high-quality health care knowledge. It is designed to respect the balance between serious and fun in both educational and game elements. The proposed architecture allows the learning objective to be clearly defined and facilitate the collaborations of actors involved in the development. A prototype of the communication skills module is presented as an example of a module design.