Design-build Experiences – ICU GAME Capstone Project

A capstone innovation project has a central role of the third study year of the curriculum of Information and Communication Technology at Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS) in Finland. This project is a 15 ECTS module combining students from the Degree Programmes in Electronics, Information Technology, Business Administration and Library and Information Services in a multidisciplinary way. In addition, Capstone unites working life with studies in a realistic and concrete way, thus benefiting both the students and the customer companies. The Capstone innovation project is one of our implementation examples of CDIO Standard 5 (Design-Implement Experiences). All innovation projects are real projects raising from the needs of the partner organizations. In this paper we focus on describing one of these innovation projects called ICU game. The assignment came from another faculty of TUAS (Faculty of Health and Wellbeing). Their partners in this project were Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the Turku University Hospital and Faculty of Nursing Science at Turku University. The intensive care unit employs a large number of nurses. Work in an ICU requires specific expertise. This expertise can be achieved partly through working in an ICU and partly in training sessions. The idea of the ICU game was to develop a tool/a serious game for nursing education to support learning these ICU specific skills and knowledge.

The aim of the project was to develop a serious game prototype simulating and teaching intensive care unit operations. The game development project used user-centric methods together with possibilities in simulation and virtual pedagogy. The capstone innovation project used three phases of CDIO – Conceive, Design and Implement. The project team started conceiving the needs, the specific environment of ICU and possible other tools in the market. After the conceive phase a prototype was designed and implemented in a cyclic process. The capstone project was a good example of experimental learning too. The CDIO standard 8 describes active learning experiential when students take on roles that simulate professional engineering practice, for example, design-implement projects, simulations, and case studies. In addition, the result of the project has effects on teaching and learning in the nurse education. The use of the prototype brings an element of active learning in the nurse education too. In this paper, the experiences of the Capstone process as well as of the ICU Game development process are reported. The ICU Game development process and CDIO design-implement experiences of Capstone are described, and the key findings based on the ICU Game development results are discussed.

Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016