Maritime City: Using Games Technology to Train Social Workers - Some Initial Results

摘要

Maritime City is an educational tool for training Healthcare professionals, currently targeted towards Social Workers. It has its roots in the serious games area and is developed in a commercial game engine. This paper presents some initial results from testing the game with in-practice Social Workers in the context of child protection, with the aim to show equivalence between this approach and more traditional methods. The testing found that the game was realistic (apart from in some areas, which has provided new directions for the research) and also showed that there are many areas of the game experience that impact on the learning in ways similar to that of traditional role-play.