"Development of an Extensible Game Architecture for Teaching Transcultural Nursing"

Video games have been shown to assist students in learning course content by making learning fun which improves learning and content retention. Video games provide a number of interesting tools for educators, including integration of a broad range of content and allowing the dynamic presentation of material to match students’ needs. Developing video games, however, is time consuming and potentially expensive. In this paper the authors describe a game framework based on an extensible architecture that allows faculty to regularly download new content as well as allow the game to be used across multiple courses and even multiple subject domains through a custom-built editor application which presumes no knowledge by the instructor of computer programming or esoteric computer languages. This system has been used to develop a game to teach Transcultural Nursing to undergraduate students at the University of Michigan-Flint Department of Nursing.