Analytical Design of Clinical Cases for Educational Games.

Preparing medical students to provide emergency care is one of the biggest challenges in health education, as novices must articulate a wide spectrum, ever-growing knowledge of a generalist physician in the shortest possible time. Previous experience has shown that a problem-based e-Learning environment, presenting clinical cases to be solved by students, has several benefits in the learning process. This paper describes the design and development of an approach to produce health learning games. The approach focuses on combining student engagement with realistic narratives. The central component is a narrative scripting language that enables rapid prototyping and integration with a data analysis backed authoring process. Our method has been materialized in an educational game authoring environment that allows the creation of complex cases and automatic generation of simpler ones. The analytical design provides a scalable method to create medical learning experiences based on well-defined medical education theories and health data.