Interaction - Bachelors
“What then?” is a gamified learning platform aimed towards providing medical students a digital space to practise and study different medical procedures. This concept was drawn from the idea of experimental learning and allowing students to make mistakes. It would follow the “Choose your own adventure” type of game design, allowing students to test their knowledge every step of the way.
In this project, I partnered up with the Herston Bio-Fabrication Institute to support their digital twin surgical training (DTST) initiative. This initiative aims to apply digital-twin and mixed-reality techniques to help train younger, less-experienced surgeons on the complexities of prolonged surgical procedures to help fast-track their experience. Thus, to providing a more immersive surgical training experience and ensuring that healthcare professionals receive high-quality training safely and efficiently.
With a very limited knowledge in games development and a basic understanding of programming, a decision was made to develop the game in Gdevelop. Gdevelope is a free 2D/3D game development application, that only requires basic code knowledge. This application also included various extensions that made various features of the game much easier to develop, such as buttons, sliders and object dragging.
Since this was such a niche topic, finding pre-developed 2D assets was a challenge. Moreover, Gdevelop required that all “objects” to be in form of “sprites” that can be manipulated. Therefore, all assets were built was scratch using Aesprite.
The game was successful in meeting its main objective, i.e., “providing medical students a digital space to practise and study different medical procedures”. All user testers stated that the game gave them the freedom to make their own choices thus testing their knowledge at every step. Not only did users find the game to be an engaging mode of learning, but one that helps them understand the content better. All users found the scoring system (hearts) to be a great indicator of their performance, as it indicated the mistakes they were making. While this added a little pressure on the user to perform well, users found it to be a great motivator. Lastly, with most interactions being intuitive, users were able to smoothly navigate through the game without confusion. Overall, users found the game to be a very enjoyable experience, that positively impacted their learning.
Over the last 8 weeks I had the opportunity to push myself out of my comfort zone. From knowing nothing about games development and design, I was successful in building a working prototype. While there are some limitations, WHAT THEN is proof of concept that gamified learning has potential in the medical field.
Kenisha is a Dual degree student studying a Bachelors of Design (Interaction) and Information Technology. She hope to use her knowledge in both areas to bridge the gap between Designers and Developers.