Impact of the state of alarm after COVID-19 on the habitual consumption of video games in primary schoolchildren

The health situation resulting from COVID-19 is affecting lifestyles starting from the earliest stages of life. Therefore, the aim was to analyse primary schoolchildren's habitual video game consumption after the end of the state of alarm caused by COVID-19. To this end, a cross-sectional study comprising 125 primary schoolchildren was designed. To measure their video game consumption, the Questionnaire on video game consumption habits was used. The Student's t-test revealed significant differences in all dimensions in favour of the boys (p < .001, for all). Additionally, those aged 11-12 years yielded higher scores in the degree of attraction to video games (p < .05), level of concern about video games (p < .05), and rate of habitual video game consumption (p < .05). In conclusion, the results of this study are in line with scientific literature, indicating greater video game consumption in boys and older schoolchildren.

Serious Games and Gamification: Health Care Workers' Experience, Attitudes, and Knowledge.

OBJECTIVE: With the rapid advancement of digital technology due to COVID-19, the health care field is embracing the use of digital technologies for learning, which presents an opportunity for teaching methods such as serious games to be developed and improved. Technology offers more options for these educational approaches. The goal of this study was to assess health care workers' experiences, attitudes, and knowledge regarding serious games in training. METHODS: The convenience sample consisted of 223 participants from the specialties of internal medicine and psychiatry who responded to questions regarding sociodemographic data, experience, attitudes, and knowledge regarding serious games. This study used an ordinal regression model to analyze the relationship between knowledge, attitudes, and experiences and the idea or wish to implement serious games. RESULTS: The majority of healthcare workers were not familiar with serious games or gamification. The results show gender and age differences regarding familiarity and willingness to use serious games. With increasing age, the respondents preferred conventional and traditional learning methods to playful teaching elements; younger generations were significantly more motivated than older generations when envisioning using elements of serious games in the future. CONCLUSIONS: The COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged the use of new technologies and digitalization. This study describes positive attitudes toward serious games, mainly in younger people working in health care. Serious games present an opportunity to develop new approaches for postgraduate medical teachings and continuing medical education.

Students, Participatory Design, and Serious Games in a Response to: 'No Algorithmization without Representation: Pilot Study on Regulatory Experiments in an Exploratory Sandbox'.

No Algorithmization without Representation tracked a cohort of 'Lithopy' crypto-government sandbox participants in a longitudinal study looking at COVID-19 contact tracing app acceptance. These survey responses extended experiences with theoretical blockchain town governance by also tracking reasons for and against compliance with contact tracing apps. They found that the expressed opinions of students were incoherent and demanded technical or policy responses outside of the students' direct experiences. In this response to that paper, I leverage the paper's (commendable) open data to suggest that the sandbox's claims of 'No Algorithmization without Representation' is a rediscovery of participatory design within the context of the serious games movement. While Role-Playing Games and War Games are excellent pedagogic tools xor planning tools-using undergraduate students' participation in them as the basis of a claim for increased representation in technology policy is a bold claim. This claim is not fully substantiated by the paper's data. Nevertheless, there is a need for better decision-making and public representation within technology design and policy-making spaces-making the claim for serious games as a meaningful public policy contribution not without merit.

Implementation of game-based training in oral rehabilitation of edentulous patients in an undergraduate dental course.

BACKGROUND: Coronavirus disease-19 dramatically changed the learning conditions of dental students, with restricted access to training sessions and clinical practice. The "Playdent" project proposed the integration of serious games (SGs) in the third-year curriculum, based on tailor-made scenarios questioning the first dental visit of edentulous patients, and examined whether training with the games would advance students' learning outcomes. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Test scores of 89 students, allocated either to a "test" group that accessed SGs during a 4-week test period in addition to conventional lectures or to a "control" group that benefited solely from conventional lectures, were measured before and immediately after the test period. The subsequent satisfaction of students was assessed in the "test" group. RESULTS: Scores obtained after the 4-week period significantly increased within the "test" group (11.1% ± 24.9%, p = 0.04, degree of freedom [df] = 30) while they did not change within the "control" group (p = 0.21, df = 57). Qualitative feedback expressed by students who played SGs during the 4-week period demonstrated that 71% of them rated the SGs as satisfactory and 91% of them judged the consistency of SGs content with lectures to be satisfactory. CONCLUSION: Game-based learning showed a positive impact on the learning outcomes of third-year students. Qualitative assessments provide insights into the pertinence of SGs offered in addition to traditional lectures of third-year complete denture courses. SGs may consolidate skills in oral rehabilitation acquired through traditional passive learning formats proposed in preclinical courses.

Information System for Symptom Diagnosis and Improvement of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Protocol for a Nonrandomized Controlled Pilot Study.

BACKGROUND: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders during childhood; however, the diagnosis procedure remains challenging, as it is nonstandardized, multiparametric, and highly dependent on subjective evaluation of the perceived behavior. OBJECTIVE: To address the challenges of existing procedures for ADHD diagnosis, the ADHD360 project aims to develop a platform for (1) early detection of ADHD by assessing the user's likelihood of having ADHD characteristics and (2) providing complementary training for ADHD management. METHODS: A 2-phase nonrandomized controlled pilot study was designed to evaluate the ADHD360 platform, including ADHD and non-ADHD participants aged 7 to 16 years. At the first stage, an initial neuropsychological evaluation along with an interaction with the serious game developed ("Pizza on Time") for approximately 30-45 minutes is performed. Subsequently, a 2-week behavior monitoring of the participants through the mADHD360 app is planned after a telephone conversation between the participants' parents and the psychologist, where the existence of any behaviors characteristic of ADHD that affect daily functioning is assessed. Once behavior monitoring is complete, the research team invites the participants to the second stage, where they play the game for a mean duration of 10 weeks (2 times per week). Once the serious game is finished, a second round of behavior monitoring is performed following the same procedures as the initial one. During the study, gameplay data were collected and preprocessed. The protocol of the pilot trials was initially designed for in-person participation, but after the COVID-19 outbreak, it was adjusted for remote participation. State-of-the-art machine learning (ML) algorithms were used to analyze labeled gameplay data aiming to detect discriminative gameplay patterns among the 2 groups (ADHD and non-ADHD) and estimate a player's likelihood of having ADHD characteristics. A schema including a train-test splitting with a 75:25 split ratio, k-fold cross-validation with k=3, an ML pipeline, and data evaluation were designed. RESULTS: A total of 43 participants were recruited for this study, where 18 were diagnosed with ADHD and the remaining 25 were controls. Initial neuropsychological assessment confirmed that the participants in the ADHD group showed a deviation from the participants without ADHD characteristics. A preliminary analysis of collected data consisting of 30 gameplay sessions showed that the trained ML models achieve high performance (ie, accuracy up to 0.85) in correctly predicting the users' labels (ADHD or non-ADHD) from their gameplay session on the ADHD360 platform. CONCLUSIONS: ADHD360 is characterized by its notable capacity to discriminate player gameplay behavior as either ADHD or non-ADHD. Therefore, the ADHD360 platform could be a valuable complementary tool for early ADHD detection. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04362982; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04362982. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): RR1-10.2196/40189.

Migration of an Escape Room-Style Educational Game to an Online Environment: Design Thinking Methodology.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has led to a sudden change in education, closing schools and shifting to online teaching, which has become an enormous challenge for teachers and students. Implementing adequate online pedagogical approaches and integrating different digital tools in the teaching process have become a priority in educational systems. Finding a way to keep students' interest and persistence in learning is an important issue that online education is facing. One possible way to establish engaging and interactive learning environments, using the energy and enthusiasm of students for educational purposes, is the use of game-based learning activities and gamification of different parts of the educational process. OBJECTIVE: This paper presents a use case of migrating an escape room-style educational game to an online environment by using the design thinking methodology. We wanted to show that the design thinking methodology is useful to create engaging and motivating online games that provide educational value. METHODS: Starting from students' perspective, we created a simple digital escape room-style game where students got an opportunity to self-assess their knowledge in computer science at their own pace. Students tested this prototype game, and their opinions about the game were collected through an online survey. The test's goal was to evaluate the students' perceptions about the implemented digital escape room-style educational game and gather information about whether it could achieve students' engagement in learning computer science during online teaching. RESULTS: In total, 117 students from sixth and seventh grades completed the survey regarding the achieved student engagement. Despite the differences in students' answers about game complexity and puzzle difficulty, most students liked the activity (mean 4.75, SD 0.67, on a scale from 1 to 5). They enjoyed the game, and they would like to participate in this kind of activity again (mean 4.74, SD 0.68). All (n=117, 100%) students found the digital escape room-style educational game interesting for playing and learning. CONCLUSIONS: The results confirmed that digital escape room-style games could be used as an educational tool to engage students in the learning process and achieve learning outcomes. Furthermore, the design thinking methodology proved to be a useful tool in the process of adding novel educational value to the digital escape room-style game.