Despite the be benefits of serious games and their growing popularity across many educational contexts, they generally have have fixed scenarios that cannot be easily modified, leading to predictable and dull experiences that can reduce user engagement. We recently introducedMoirai, a novel, no-code serious games authoring platform that allows educators with limited (if any) programming experience to use a diagram-based interface to create new modifications and customize serious game scenarios focused on decision and communication skills development. In this paper, we describe a usability study that saw medical educators with limited programming knowledge create a pre-defined serious game scenario usingMoirai. Results indicate a high degree of usability and revealed various changes that can be made to improveMoirai.

In Canada, the City of Oshawa recently became a member of the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Global Network for Age-friendly Cities and Communities to promote healthy, active aging and good quality of life for older residents. Part of this strategy includes educating municipal employees on age-friendly cultural competencies. To facilitate this, we have developed an innovative and immersive virtual environment that couples serious gaming with a gamified educational network learning management system. The virtual environment will provide an interactive and engaging learning platform to teach age-friendly cultural competencies to municipal staff.

This mixed-method research addresses two problems: 1) the need to understand more deeply the lived experiences of individuals with mental illness to inform the design of a virtual serious game (VSG) and; 2) the need for more accessible and interactive mental health VSGs for nursing student learning before attending community placements. We began with an Ontario-wide collection of individual narratives about living with mental illness using qualitative methods and then applied the findings in two ways. First, we incorporated the person-centered feedback into the serious VSGs’ storyline, and secondly, we developed and refined the VSG prototype. Next, we will implement the VSG into the nursing curriculum for evaluation of learning outcomes.

This paper proposes a framework, called Ubiquitous Laboratory for Practical Activities (u-LabPA), which allows students to bring in data from laboratory practices and access them retrospectively in the form of simulations or virtual environments. Simulations were conducted using Petri nets to analyze the system behavior and its application in a physical Laboratory.