Can 3D gamified simulations be valid vocational training tools for persons with intellectual disability? A pilot based on a real-life situation

Objective: To investigate if 3D gamified simulations can be valid vocational training tools for persons with intellectual disability. Methods: A 3D gamified simulation composed by a set of training tasks for cleaning in hostelry was developed in collaboration with professionals of a real hostel and pedagogues of a special needs school. The learning objectives focus on the acquisition of vocabulary skills, work procedures, social abilities and risk prevention. Several accessibility features were developed to make the tasks easy to do from a technological point-of-view. A pilot experiment was conducted to test the pedagogical efficacy of this tool on intellectually disabled workers and students. Results: User scores in the gamified simulation follow a curve of increasing progression. When confronted with reality, they recognized the scenario and tried to reproduce what they had learned in the simulation. Finally, they were interested in the tool, they showed a strong feeling of immersion and engagement, and they reported having fun. Conclusions: On the basis of this experiment we believe that 3D gamified simulations can be efficient tools to train social and professional skills of persons with intellectual disabilities contributing thus to foster their social inclusion through work.Postprint (author's final draft

Gestió d'una col·lecció de jocs

Desenvolupament d'una aplicació de gestió de col·leccions amb complements de recuperació d'informació de llocs web

IntegraGame: a real-life inspired serious game for social and professional training of people with intellectual disability

This paper describes IntegraGame a game for professional training and social empowerment of persons with intellectual disabilities. The game was designed based on a real case of professional integration, the InOut hostel near Barcelona, in which 90% of the personal has a disability. Integragame re- produces in 3D as realistically as possible the real hostel and presents several tasks to train cleaning procedures, vocab- ulary and social behavior. The game is adapted to a wide range of intellectual disability: it provides automatic navi- gation, uses verbal instructions and diferent types of visual assistance and feedback. It has been designed in narrow col- laboration with educators and managers. It has been tested by users throughout its development and evaluated with a group of students with ID. The results are positive show- ing that students could use the game, had fun with it and learned from it.Postprint (published version

Validation of organ dose calculations with PyMCGPU-IR in realistic interventional set-ups

Introduction: Interventional radiology procedures are associated with high skin dose exposure. The 2013/59/ EURATOM Directive establishes that the equipment used for interventional radiology must have a device or a feature informing the practitioner of relevant parameters for assessing patient dose at the end of the procedure. This work presents and validates PyMCGPU-IR, a patient dose monitoring tool for interventional cardiology and radiology procedures based on MC-GPU. MC-GPU is a freely available Monte Carlo (MC) code of photon transport in a voxelized geometry which uses the computational power of commodity Graphics Processing Unit cards (GPU) to accelerate calculations. Methodologies: PyMCGPU-IR was validated against two different experimental set-ups. The first one consisted of skin dose measurements for different beam angulations on an adult Rando Alderson anthropomorphic phantom. The second consisted of organ dose measurements in three clinical procedures using the Rando Alderson phantom. Results: The results obtained for the skin dose measurements show differences below 6%. For the clinical procedures the differences are within 20% for most cases. Conclusions: PyMCGPU-IR offers both, high performance and accuracy for dose assessment when compared with skin and organ dose measurements. It also allows the calculation of dose values at specific positions and organs, the dose distribution and the location of the maximum doses per organ. In addition, PyMCGPU-IR overcomes the time limitations of CPU-based MC codePeer ReviewedPostprint (updated version

Gestió d'una col·lecció de jocs

Desenvolupament d'una aplicació de gestió de col·leccions amb complements de recuperació d'informació de llocs web

Can 3D gamified simulations be valid vocational training tools for persons with intellectual disability? A pilot based on a real-life situation

Objective: To investigate if 3D gamified simulations can be valid vocational training tools for persons with intellectual disability. Methods: A 3D gamified simulation composed by a set of training tasks for cleaning in hostelry was developed in collaboration with professionals of a real hostel and pedagogues of a special needs school. The learning objectives focus on the acquisition of vocabulary skills, work procedures, social abilities and risk prevention. Several accessibility features were developed to make the tasks easy to do from a technological point-of-view. A pilot experiment was conducted to test the pedagogical efficacy of this tool on intellectually disabled workers and students. Results: User scores in the gamified simulation follow a curve of increasing progression. When confronted with reality, they recognized the scenario and tried to reproduce what they had learned in the simulation. Finally, they were interested in the tool, they showed a strong feeling of immersion and engagement, and they reported having fun. Conclusions: On the basis of this experiment we believe that 3D gamified simulations can be efficient tools to train social and professional skills of persons with intellectual disabilities contributing thus to foster their social inclusion through work

IntegraGame: a real-life inspired serious game for social and professional training of people with intellectual disability

This paper describes IntegraGame a game for professional training and social empowerment of persons with intellectual disabilities. The game was designed based on a real case of professional integration, the InOut hostel near Barcelona, in which 90% of the personal has a disability. Integragame re- produces in 3D as realistically as possible the real hostel and presents several tasks to train cleaning procedures, vocab- ulary and social behavior. The game is adapted to a wide range of intellectual disability: it provides automatic navi- gation, uses verbal instructions and diferent types of visual assistance and feedback. It has been designed in narrow col- laboration with educators and managers. It has been tested by users throughout its development and evaluated with a group of students with ID. The results are positive show- ing that students could use the game, had fun with it and learned from it

SKETCH'NDO: A framework for the creation of task-based serious games

We present SKETCH'NDO, a framework for the interactive design and creation of single-user task-based serious games in 3D virtual environments. The games are dimensionally congruent: inherently 2D tasks such as reading and writing are done in 2D, while manipulation tasks are 3D. The architecture of the system allows educators to design the tasks with a graphical editor that creates the game automatically. This editor does not require gaming expertise. It only needs educators to specify the correct ways of doing the task, without having to consider all possible erroneous learner's decisions. SKETCH'NDO provides a complete mechanism of monitoring and evaluation of the learner's performance that allows a precise assessment of the learning process. It offers a gradation of levels of assistance that can be fixed by educators or automatically adjusted to the trainee's skills. This way, the same task can be trained from a strictly conductist strategy to a fully constructivist one

SKETCH'NDO: A framework for the creation of task-based serious games

We present SKETCH'NDO, a framework for the interactive design and creation of single-user task-based serious games in 3D virtual environments. The games are dimensionally congruent: inherently 2D tasks such as reading and writing are done in 2D, while manipulation tasks are 3D. The architecture of the system allows educators to design the tasks with a graphical editor that creates the game automatically. This editor does not require gaming expertise. It only needs educators to specify the correct ways of doing the task, without having to consider all possible erroneous learner's decisions. SKETCH'NDO provides a complete mechanism of monitoring and evaluation of the learner's performance that allows a precise assessment of the learning process. It offers a gradation of levels of assistance that can be fixed by educators or automatically adjusted to the trainee's skills. This way, the same task can be trained from a strictly conductist strategy to a fully constructivist one

Diseño e implementación de un juego serio 3D para el entrenamiento del control del Bypass Cardiopulmonar

Se presenta el diseño, implementación y validación de un juego serio (o videojuego educativo) en 3D para el entrenamiento de la técnica de perfusión o Bypass Cardiopulmonar que consiste en el manejo de una bomba de circulación extracorpórea durante una intervención quirúrgica a corazón parado. Se pretende que sea un videojuego para complementar la formación práctica de los encargados de manejar esta máquina de quirófano, los perfusionistas, además de una herramienta de entrenamiento para mejorar las habilidades de los profesionales. En este artículo se describen los modelos gráficos implementados; los modelos funcionales que simulan el comportamiento de la bomba de circulación extracorpórea virtual en respuesta a los cambios fisiológicos del paciente y las interacciones del jugador; y el sistema de evaluación diseñado. Por último, se presenta también el proceso de la primera fase de validación, con los resultados de estas pruebas