A preliminary evaluation of an immersive 3D simulated practice environment for social and health care training

The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) are responsible for regulating the education and training of people working in social services in Scotland as it is the main regulatory body responsible for their registration. There are currently 191,000 social service workers in Scotland practicing with a variety of people in a variety of settings ranging from care home services for adults to early year settings such as nurseries and out of care clubs. Games-based Learning (GBL) has captured the interest of educationalists for being a potential form of highly motivational supplementary learning and has been applied in a number of different disciplines including health care and social science education. Due to the current state of computer games technology, it now allows the creation of 3D immersive games with high fidelity graphics and increased realism beyond that of 2D games or web-based eLearning games to facilitate increased engagement and immersion. It was therefore considered to be beneficial to use current computer games technology to create a realistic, 3D simulated practice environment for social and health care training. This paper details recent work with a generic simulated practice environment developed in Unity for childhood practice training. The paper presents an analysis of a preliminary evaluation that has been performed using the simulated practice environment with 20 Social Science students at the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) to generate empirical evidence in the field of GBL and inform the next stages of evaluation and development. The results obtained were very encouraging and the preliminary evaluation suggested improvements to the environment and the evaluation process.