Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

We just finished a meeting with Mark Sciegaj, who teaches HPA 101: Introduction to Health Services Organization.  Mark approached us about using SimHealth in his course, as a capstone exercise allowing the students to put their knowledge to use in an applied setting.  What I found interesting is that SimHealth was released in 1994, intended to allow players to shape public health policy.  Mark mentioned today that a lot of the policy prompts from the game are STILL applicable, and the health care system portrayed in the game from 1994 is nearly identical to the system in place today. 

We are working with Mark to figure out the actual project for the students as well.  One idea we are pursuing is to use the Blogs@PSU platform with a specific tag for the course, where students would reflect and write about their decision-making process after gameplay sessions.  The custom tag would allow Mark to pull everything into a single page and allow the students to read and compare strategies.  This is shaping up to be an exciting project, even when using a game from 1994!