Abstract
We explore how an AR simulation created by a multidisciplinary team evolved into a more interactive, student-centered learning game. TheCovidCampusexperience was designed to help college students understand how their decisions can affect their probability of infection throughout a day on campus. There were eight decision points throughout the day. Within group comparisons of immediate learning gains and self-reported behavioral changes were analyzed. Results revealed a significant increase in confidence in asking safety-related questions. Post-play, a significant majority of players listed new actions they would take to increase their safety; players were more agentic in their choices. This game allowed players to go back and replay with different choices, but only 7% chose to replay. Short, interactive desktop games may be an effective method for disseminating information about how to stay safer during a pandemic. The game appeared to positively change most players’ health behaviors related to mitigation of an infectious disease. Designers of interactive health games should strive to create multi-disciplinary teams, include constructs that allow players to agentically make decisions, and to compare outcomes over time.
Highlights
This article outlines the evolution of the creation of an interactive simulation-style game for public health
The first was the inclusion of multidisciplinary teams
They strongly recommend this for health games yet only 42% (68/161) of their reviewed games either explicitly mentioned the use of such teams or implicitly mentioned the involvement of experts, such as, instructional, clinical, and User Experience (UX) designers during game development
Summary
This article outlines the evolution of the creation of an interactive simulation-style game for public health. We represent a highly multidisciplinary team of students, researchers, and professors. The game was made by undergraduate students from three departments with guidance from an epidemiology subject matter expert, a learning scientist, a human factors engineer, a user interface design expert, and a biomedical engineer. The lead author has been designing educational games for over a dozen years using multiple media - either on 2D or in Mixed Reality (Johnson-Glenberg et al, 2014a; Johnson-Glenberg et al, 2014b; Johnson-Glenberg and Megowan-Romanowicz, 2017) or in Virtual Reality (VR) (Johnson-Glenberg, 2018; JohnsonGlenberg et al, 2019; Johnson-Glenberg et al, 2020), with an emphasis on learning via embodiment. The spectrum of augmented to virtual reality is referred to as XR (eXtended Realities)
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