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Communicate! - A Serious Game for Communication Skills

Johan Jeuring, Frans Grosfeld, Bastiaan Heeren, Michiel Hulsbergen, Richta IJntema, Vincent Jonker, Nicole Mastenbroek, Maarten van der Smagt, Frank Wijmans, Majanne Wolters, and Henk van Zeijts

Communicate! is a serious game for practicing communication skills. It supports practicing interpersonal communication skills between a health care professional such as a doctor or a pharmacist, or a (business) psychologist, and a patient or client. A player selects a scenario, and holds a consultation with a virtual character. In the consultation, the player chooses between the various options offered in the scenario. The player scores on the learning goals addressed by the scenario, and gets immediate feedback through the effect of the choice between the answer options on the utterance and emotion of the virtual character. Communicate! also offers an editor for scenarios. A scenario is a graph-like structure, extended with several constructs to avoid the development of repetitive structures. We have performed several experiments with Communicate!, both with students to evaluate the use of Communicate! in various programs at Utrecht University, and with teachers to evaluate the development of scenarios for Communicate!

In Proceedings of Design for Teaching and Learning in a Networked World: 10th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2015, pages 513-517, 2015.

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