A low-fidelity serious game authoring tool and educational network to facilitate medical-based cultural competence education

Abstract

Here I present Fydlyty, a web-based, low-fidelity serious game for medical-based cultural competence education and training. Fydlyty includes a scenario editor and dialogue editor which has the ability to build conversations, interpret responses, and respond to questions/answers from the game player. These responses are based on predefined cultural characteristics of the virtual character (avatar), and on different moods that the avatar may express depending on the situation. In addition to its educational purposes, Fydlyty has been developed as a research tool to examine the role of graphical-based fidelity in the learning process. Furthermore, to facilitate debriefing through a community of learners, the OPEN educational network is introduced. OPEN is designed to provide the instructor with flexibility to frame a learning process, thereby teach, evaluate, and attain feedback from the students. The experiments conducted provide evidence that both these tools can be used for cultural competence training in health professions education.