technology
Another one was a handovers type game where the students
could learn medical abbreviations. They get to hear them. The
game involved catching the abbreviations in the form of little
capsules that fell down from the sky, and you had to capture the
right ones, which had the abbreviation that you were told to get.
And the other one had 11 games and had subsections on
themes of obesity and nutrition. Basically, some of the gameplay
was really simple, such as hangman and tic-tac-toe, and there
were mini games and coding mini games as well. Basically,
there’s not a huge amount that focuses specifically on nursing,
and that’s something we found in our study, but these games all
showed promise.
And we know from other areas outside of nursing that
games are very engaging for students, particularly if you’ve got
educational content where the students need a lot more exposure
and repetition and practice. The teacher just can’t give that in
the classroom, but you can do a bit more of this repetition and
redo scenarios and situations and become familiar with nursing
content, if you are given the opportunity to do so in a game. And
they just start the game over again and they get exposed to the
same materials over again until they become very familiar with it.
What are some of the other benefits that gaming brings about
above that of other methods of learning, and what are some of
the potential issues that come with video gaming?
The benefits of games, if you have educational content, which
you don’t have enough time to deal with face to face, might be
just becoming familiar with medical terminology or it might be
something like walking students through a decision-making
process, a nursing decision.
It’s very hard to give attention to students one-on-one, but you
can set up a nursing decision-making game and you can give
them decision points, and at each point they get options or they
might type in some response, and the game can automatically
give feedback to the student and interact with them personally.
So every time a student plays a game, it’s a one-on-one
experience for them, and you know that you’re giving the student
accurate information. And you don’t need to have just a correct or
incorrect answer. It might be that the answer the student selects
in a game or offers in a game is somewhat correct, but there’s
probably a better option. They may be given, let’s say, a reward
system; they may not get 100 points, they may only get 60 points,
but they’ll still get a reward for doing something which is useful,
even if it wasn’t exactly correct, because decision-making is not
very black and white sometimes when it comes to nursing.
The student might go through a whole scenario with maybe 20
decision points, look at their score and say, “Oh, I could do better,”
then go back through it. Now, while they’re doing that, they’re
actually learning. They’re learning about the options available,
they’re getting feedback on the options that they’re choosing. It’s
a safe environment, they’re not doing this on real patients, they’re
just walking through a scenario a few times. They’re motivated,
and they can explore their decisions.
In a game, they can deliberately choose a wrong decision to see
what happens, and it might be built into the game that the patient
is shown to have a very negative reaction and they can actually
see, “Oh, gosh, is that what happens if I make a choice?”
The student can take risks and have a bit of fun and explore,
and that’s not really possible in a classroom situation. First of all,
we don’t have the time to spend one-on-one walking through
scenarios with students.
And students can practise with each other if they like, but often
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