Implementation of a Digital Live-Action Gaming Experience for Interprofessional Learning and Training

Abstract

AbstractInterprofessional education is required by all athletic training, medical, pharmacy, nursing, and public health students at Texas A&M University. One such opportunity for collaborative training has been Disaster Day, the nation’s largest student-led interprofessional emergency response simulation. This annual training of 500–800 students takes place on a single day, in two 4-h sessions, at a designated site on campus. Due to COVID-19, the simulation could not be offered in-person in 2020, so the organizers looked for alternative solutions. We opted to use digital games, which have been proposed and used for formal and informal education for several years. While there have been games specifically developed for interprofessional training, none of those games were readily available for use by other institutions, nor is their focus on disaster response. In this chapter, we provide a detailed analysis of how an interdisciplinary team of health professions educators and game designers met interprofessional learning requirements while maintaining student engagement. Lessons from an abbreviated schedule and limited budget will be discussed. The approach incorporated different technologies and tools that are readily available. We will discuss pitfalls, assumptions, and full implementation of our approach. This will allow others to replicate our method and create similar highly engaging learning experiences for remote and online learning.