The evolutionary development of a serious game for clinical laboratory students

Abstract

Implementing hands-on experience for clinical laboratory can be a challenge due to budgetary constraints. To provide students with the opportunity to practice repeatedly before applying the knowledge to the live laboratory setting, a mobile serious game called 'Clinic Chemistry' was developed. In this paper, we share the experience in developing two versions of the game from the perspective of game designers/developers as part of an end-to-end educational game research. We have adopted the evolutionary rapid prototyping paradigm to create the early prototype, the prealpha. The pre-alpha was then evolved into the alpha release. The pre-production and production steps of the two versions, as well as evolved game components, are reported. We conclude that the rapid prototype is the key to our successful release of the game. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.