Beginning to Put the Game Together...

My current interest in gaming revolves around supporting chiropractic and health care education. The game/simulation I hope to develop will be based on the process of obtaining information from a history and exam to come to a correct diagnosis for a patient presentation. The proposed game described below supports my personal learning theory as it is based in cognitivism. Students need an underlying basis of facts in order to succeed. If they fail, they will be sent back to T1 in chiropractic school (i.e. a tutorial)- wonderful motivation! Far transfer will be supported as the elements will be derived from real-life situations and scenarios as much as possible using the typical forms used in an office and video clips of real a real patient. Hopefully the gaming elements will serve as motivating and reinforcing factors stimulating the students to want to complete the exercise. I am motivated to make an extremely important part of a student learning experience as fun and interesting as possible.

My primary concern still revolves around actually creating a game that I can use in my teaching. I do not currently have the resources or team players to create the ideal type of game that I visualize. Since I don’t want to simply present a game idea for my final project I will need to scale down my vision. I will try to create a simulation with embedded gaming elements and concepts rather than a full-fledged game. The student will start out by clicking to enter a chiropractic clinic. They would then a patient file folder to view information regarding their patient. Students will eventually have to progress through a series of cases to successfully complete the game. These cases will support the concepts emphasized in the Methods 3 technique course. The consequences of incorrectly diagnosing and treating a patient might range from the patient leaving your office, screaming in pain, demanding their money back, to the most serious- death or disability related to failure to identify a stroke in progress. Success results in an increase in patient files and money in the bank. I could eventually expand the game to include insurance coding elements and could have some fun with this- video clips of insurance adjustors, money entering and leaving the bank account, etc. Some of these elements may be theoretical at this point due to my limited skill set and lack of a game design team. However, the underlying simulation will still support the learning in my classroom. A simple game can be just as engaging as a multimedia, sound-blasting game with realistic bloodshed so that is what I am going to focus on. I think that using a branching concept might work. I could perhaps do this with the lesson function in Moodle or with a series of linked web pages created in Dreamweaver. I also have access to an interactive scenario builder software that could possibly be integrated into this process. The gaming elements would need to be embedded into these pages which could be challenging or impossible at this time. I will still describe the vision for these elements. Perhaps if the student answers a question correctly the branch takes them to a page with a flash animation adding money to their bank account and directing them forward in the process. If they answer incorrectly, they are sent back to chiropractic school via a tutorial and must answer the questions in this tutorial before they can see the patient again.