Research

The first-aid game was created to teach high school students how to perform basic first-aid and resuscitation procedures including, when available, the use of a portable defibrillator as the ones being deployed in most public spaces across Spain.

The game was commissioned by the CATEDU, to study its potential deployment alongside the ongoing effort to organize sessions in different high schools where a medical professional visits the school to arrange a tutorial.

A test pilot has been conducted with over 300 students from 4 different high schools (two urban schools and two rural schools), with a statistically significant improvement in an experiment with a pre-test and a post-test.

The full details of the experiment have been published in the Journal of the Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine (SEMES).

Marchiori EJ, Ferrer G, Fernández-Manjón B, Povar Marco J, Suberviola González JF, Giménez Valverde A. Video-game instruction in basic life support maneuvers. Emergencias. 2012;24:433-7. (download PDF)

Article details

Citation

Eugenio J Marchiori, Gaspar Ferrer, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, Javier Povar-Marco, José Fermín Suberviola, Antonio Giménez-Valverde. Education in basic life support maneuvers using video games. Emergencias, 2012; 24: 433-437. (download PDF)

in Spanish:

Marchiori EJ, Ferrer G, Fernández-Manjón B, Povar Marco J, Fermín Suberviola J, Giménez Valverde A. Instrucción en maniobras de soporte vital básico mediante videojuegos a escolares: comparación de resultados frente a un grupo control. Emergencias. 2012;24:433-7. (download PDF)

Abstract

Objectives: 1) To assess the usefulness of an educational video game to teach the theory of basic life support to high school students; 2) to compare video game instruction to the traditional teaching of basic life support maneuvers through practical demonstrations by healthcare professionals.

Methods: An educational video game was developed according to the ILCOR 2010 guidelines. The study was carried out in a sample of 344 secondary school students in Aragon, Spain. The students, who were allocated to an experimental group and a control group, took a test before and after instruction in order to detect change in knowledge.

Results: Viable data were obtained for 331 students. The 187 students in the experimental group had a mean grade of 4.51 (out of a maximum score of 10) before playing the game, and a mean grade of 7.48 afterwards. Students in the control group had a mean grade of 4.95 before and 8.56 afterwards. The differences in each group were significant (t test). After bivariate analysis of variance, the differences in both groups remained significant.

Conclusions: The experimental group achieved a significant increase in theoretical knowledge, although they learned less than students in the control group. The relevance of these results rests on the lower cost per instructional session for the video game, which can be played an unlimited number of times without supervision, as opposed to the high cost of providing visits of healthcare professionals to all high schools. [Emergencias 2012; 24: 433-437]

Full text

For a free PDF copy of the article, go to the EMERGENCIAS medical journal (in Spanish) (in English)

or please contact Prof. Fernández-Manjón (balta@fdi.ucm.es)

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