technology
Game plans
Game-based learning offers
a safe and convenient way
for nursing students to
develop essential skills.
Amanda Müller interviewed
by Dallas Bastian
B
ooting up a video game in class or at home might help
students hone nursing skills, a new study suggests.
A group of Australian researchers looked at the ways
video game-based learning links to the development of decision-
making, motivation and other benefits.
“Demand on the nursing profession to make clinical decisions
about clients under strict time-restrained conditions leads
to uncertainty and risk,” the authors wrote. “Such pressure is
particularly evident in outpatient and community settings where
nurses need to perform complex problem-solving activities
involving clients with multifaceted disease processes within an
ever-changing environment.
“While the precise mechanism through which video games may
improve decision-making is unclear, features such as multisensory
stimuli, time limitations, feedback and repeated exposure may
have an influence in several ways.”
The study’s authors added that although game-based learning
potentially offers a safe and convenient environment for nursing
students to develop essential skills, nurse educators are typically
slow to adopt such methods.
Nursing Review spoke with co-author Dr Amanda Müller
from Flinders University about some of the other bottlenecks
to game-based nursing education and the learning potential of
video games.
NR: What are some of the games currently available that are or
could be tailored to nurse education?
AM: First, we should define games. You’ve got gamification versus
what an older generation might understand as video games or
computer games.
Gamification would be something like putting on a leaderboard,
where the scores of students who maybe do some test quizzes
28 | nursingreview.com.au
might be displayed for the whole school to see, and the leaders
m