Cast Wisdom +2 Fun
HackHealth Gets Game
An after-school health literacy program for middle-schoolers gets a healing buff with a dose of game-based learning! These series of adventures between an unsuspecting player who joined the party of a level 20 Life Cleric to fight against Plague and the Plight of Paper is but a peek into their larger campaign to earn funding within the Grizzly Ground of Grants.
​BRITTNI THE BUTTON-MASHER
Allow me to introduce two supporting characters in my story: my brothers. At eight and eleven years my junior, finding shared experiences can be a challenge. Before books could be read, Super Mario took the screen requiring minimal dexterity. My openness to this new media, followed by comics, manga, anime, and YouTube videos, opened a door to deeper relationships with my brothers while creating a new lifelong interest in video games in particular, interactive media in general. As an older sister with a background in secondary English teaching, the intersections of education, knowledge, and teenagers’ lives is a driving passion of mine that hasn’t lessened despite an alternative career in librarianship. Students are a vulnerable population, subject to imposed deadlines and standardized learning/performance expectations; thus, my mission to empower students as they grow into happy, healthy adults who are also engaged and productive citizens persists. It is a broad interest in adolescent and young adult (AYA) services, with a narrower focus on health education, that guides past (links offsite to YA resource guide on sexual health) and current endeavors.
Flashback to 2015: Dr. Beth St. Jean (links offsite to faculty profile) and Dr. Mega Subramaniam (links offsite to faculty profile), working with school librarians, developed and implemented HackHealth (links offsite to program site), a 12-week local after-school health literacy program for middle schoolers in Prince George’s County. Aims for the program were to increase both interest in health and health-related self-efficacy, while also improving students' ability to find and evaluate the credibility of digital health information. The second year, sessions began with an original, specially-designed digital health literacy skills pre-assessment worksheet, to be re-administered at the end of the program to gauge individual digital health literacy gains. However, many students so openly disliked the worksheet that it was not re-administered. Instructors realized assessment needed to be transformed into something less test-like and more fun.
HACKHEALTH'S BOREDOM BOSS
LEVELING UP ONE LEARNING OBJECT AT A TIME
Current day: Although HackHealth has not been operational since 2016 due to lack of funds, my investment in it was immediate. I was impressed with the thoroughness of its curriculum, thrilled with its free public availability as an open educational resource, charmed by stories of the students, and delighted by the range and creativity of learning artifacts. I was eager to join efforts in increasing student engagement and/or funding potential, and game-based learning – specifically gamification and serious games – seemed as though it might be able to do both. I had already created one visual novel for YAs regarding library and librarian biases and, thus, had some working knowledge to serve as the foundation of my approach. A visual novel is a type of video game with minimal gameplay and emphasis on story via text. Generally, gameplay in visual novels is limited to pressing a button to progress the game. Although many visual novels feature narrative choices similar to Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books and multiple endings, the first visual novel I created did not feature these elements. One of my goals for this new venture was to introduce branching dialogue as well as scripting that tracked student responses for instructor review. To ensure that my efforts at game-based learning were soundly evidence-based, I independently completed two Coursera courses, one on Gamification and another on Serious Gaming (links offsite to certificates), and researched health literacy.
The visual novel, having undergone user testing by my youngest brother, is officially ready for play! My brother's feedback prompted many revisions, primarily in word choice, style, and length. In the future, there are three major additional game-based learning curriculum changes with which I hope to experiment: redesigning the Qualtrics quiz to either 1) incorporate gamified learning technologies such as Kahoot! or Padlet, or 2) shift from a score-based pre-assessment to identification of strengths and weaknesses via question generation and/or mind mapping strategies; developing a role-playing game using RPG Maker MV; and introducing cooperative design with emphasis on 1) makerspaces and health wearable design; 2) student game design; and/or 3) gamification of the entire program.