Parvati:    
Welcome to “Designing Compelling Medical Games.”
Welcome to Stanford University and to Wallenberg Hall.  It’s a very special educational building.  This building has been built to teach in new ways.

Coming back to the topic of hand:
This is a third in a series of workshops that is sponsored by TATRC West and Stanford University.  TATRC is Telemedicine and Advance Technology Research Center, and it is a part of the department of defense, a group that does the army medical research.  We are happy that this area of education and training is of interest nationally.

I am going to be telling you a little bit about us because it’s very interesting why medical schools should be doing this.  I’ve been working at Summit and I Direct it, and it’s been around for about 15 years; it’s very much disciplinary.  One of the key things that we’ve been trying to do is to see how education might be going to change over the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years.   Even in the last fifteen years we think it has changed dramatically, and a lot of this has to do with technology.   Among the many reasons that teaching we think needs to be changed, a key one is that the students are changing. Today’s student coming into college and into medical school is somebody who is as we call, “multi-channel multi-tasking”.  These are people who think nothing of listening to music, being on the phone while they are doing something that needs visual attention; maybe watching television, (lets hope they’re watching the web lecture),  and certainly instant messaging at the same time as playing games.  This type of person when we put them into a room and force them to listen to one person is not necessarily going to make best use of their rewired brains.  These are people who have learned to grow up different from many of us.  For people like this, how do we make learning a challenge and interesting?  One of the areas we think is gaming.  So, we have put together a series of workshops with a following purpose.

We are trying to build a community that is interested in gaming for learning; that may already have been busy in the area of simulation and that wants to see how to move into this additional dimension of gaming.  So we have two goals for our workshops. 

• One is to increase the knowledge of this community in simulation based learning and game based learning. 
• The second is actually to create a community of academia industry and government that wants to explore this area. 

We will therefore ask your help. We will be distributing questionnaires not just to evaluate the workshop but also to evaluate yourselves.  We are going to ask you about your knowledge of interest in simulations and gaming.  Who you know, who you work with, what projects you’re coming up with?  We are trying to track whether over these two years there is a change in this community. 
         So, please when we hand out the questionnaires, answer them.

We’ve had two workshops so far.  The first one was at “Medicine meets Virtual Reality”, last January, in Long Beach.  It was a pre-workshop, and we had what we thought was astounding attendance, an absolutely unexpected over 100 people, actually 120.  We were planning for max 80.  And it was an intense day. 

We had another workshop last June which was really for the Medical School Dean’s office people at the Slice of Life association of American medical colleges; it  was a smaller one, and there we tried a little bit of hands on game building.  That was very novel and new to this group and I think we learnt a lot.

This is just a quick view of the first workshop. The people that spoke are listed on the left: Mike Zyda, Noah Falstein, Craig Brannon, Tiffany Grunewald from USC, Butch Rosser, a surgeon who has been developing evidence that gaming can actually impact surgical performance, Bill Swartoutwho leads game research at USC, Kay Howell form the Learning Federation, and we have Mike Schleicher also from the Learning Federation, Mike Mastrangelo who is also somewhere here, and we had Ben Sawyer. Ben Sawyer and Noah Falstein are both game designers.   It was a great gathering of gamers and medical educators and the discussion didn’t stop.    Just to show you some of the interaction, you can see Dr. Heinrichs is in the back leading a discussion, there were panels, and a large group of people and then the conversation kept going.  Sometimes when we started a discussion, five minutes, six minutes nobody wanted to stop. 

The themes that came up were interesting. 
People wanted a grass roots communication channel, they wanted some kind of way to talk to each other, and they wanted blogs.  In actual fact we’ve tried creating a blog, but it’s difficult to get people to write to it.  The people want these things but they may not be willing to put their effort into it. 

They wanted more conferences.   I have to say gaming conferences are increasing, though the medical education in gaming are not that many.  They want to create a concersion so that they can share resources; this has not happened yet. 

They want an inventory of medical games.  They wanted to know more about funding and they were very interested in the process of the development and design which is why we have put this particular workshop together.  So these are things that we hope will grow over the next two years. 

We did have some unexpected items.
The attendance was unexpectedly diverse.  We expected medical educators and we got Deans; (they wanted to know what this thing was about.) 
We got people who were in educational development, who wanted really in depth design development.

We had some passionate gamers (who were worried whether the education people were just going to focus on the learning objectives and not have something that was fun), and they talked about how gamers explore and test the boundaries of everything, and that education is supposed to go down this straight path; some of them were very skeptical about whether learning and fun could happen together.  It was a very intense interactive workshop. 

We have three more workshops planned.
One that you are at right now;  in December we have one that is more focused in the psychiatric area using gaming to change attitude in obsessive compulsive disorders for performance enhancement.  Brenda Wiederhold is very well known in this area and she will be the program chair for that, and then we will have another one at MMVR in January 2006.  In general they have been very successful.  We’ve been good at linking designers and educators and it’s certainly created some very specific interests.  Today we are going to address the issue of design.  In future we will probably address one on curricular integration.

David Gaba:        
I’m David Gaba and I’m one those associate Deans who showed up at the MMVR workshop.  I’m the Associate Dean for Immersive and Simulation Based Learning at the School of Medicine here at Stanford, so I’d like to echo Partivi’s welcome to all of you to Stanford and to the workshop. 

We’ve just created a center for Immersive and Simulation Based Learning here in the Medical School, one of the only ones of its kind, and the acronym for that is CISL, so if you hear anyone referring to “sizzle” that’s what it refers to.  We see simulation as being an extremely broad spectrum of things ranging from verbal simulation; that’s people talking about cases and situations that they have been in, paper and pencil simulations, games, desk top simulations, all the way up to full blown virtual realities and the use of mannequin based simulators and complete recreations of clinical environments.  That’s the area I’m familiar with, but I’m very happy that SUMMIT is the leader in both developing game type simulations for medical education and also in holding this series of workshops for the community at large, so that people can learn more about this part of the spectrum and develop more things in this part of the spectrum.  The vision that many of us have for simulation in healthcare is that it would be fully embedded in the fabric of how healthcare is done.  It won’t be just an add-on that people are supposed to do on their own time.  This will be a large part of how people learn to do healthcare business and how they will be sustained over their entire career in being competent in caring professionals.  This is the model we see in other industries in which peoples lives depend on skilled performance of personnel; and this is the model that we would like to see in health care as well.  And all parts of the spectrum of simulation have important rolls to play there.  We still believe that it would be necessary for people to come through big simulators where they physically recreate the actions and work with actual people on site, much as they do in real patient care.  We can only do that so many times and games have many advantages in being distributed, being able to be everywhere, having people link up together on the internet, and all the things that you all know so well.  So as you go through the workshop I would like you to just keep in mind the context of how games will fit in to this much larger picture of this revolution in healthcare and continuing education.  I think it’s a very exciting program that Partivi, LeRoy and the SUMMIT team have put together and I think you will enjoy it a lot.

So thanks very much for coming.