The last decade was characterized by the rapid development of information technologies and the rapid development of digital learning tools which can help educators reach more potential learners, improve outcomes, and transform post-secondary education at universities, colleges, vocational schools, and job training programs. Digital learning tools in nursing education are particularly suitable for training clinical decision making skills (Peters et al. 2018), as clinical decision making cannot be captured through observation of direct action alone (Dechenes et al. 2011). In this context, decision making requires not only purely technical aspects, but in particular critical-reflexive and social-communicative skills. The younger generations that have grown up in our environment of rapid developments in mobile devices may become more motivated to learn when digital technologies are incorporated in education. The use in clinical environments of mobile devices loaded may help close the gap between theory and practice and enhance the evidence-based practice of undergraduate students. In the project the consortium intends to make use of an innovative serious game for training nursing skills and create relevant learning situations that fit well with nursing training in all partner countries and in general on a European level. The learning game "Take Care” is designed to deal with complex nursing case work by letting the learners explore and experience simulated situations. This creates the possibility of training and testing professionally relevant skills in practice-oriented, but digitally simulated working environments. The game is an innovative way of training a variety of skills that cannot be learned from books very well but need to be trained before nurse practitioners see real work environments. Digital care simulations have been developed in which learners have the opportunity to practice decision-making in complex and multidimensional care situations without actually endangering themselves or people in need of care. The challenges in nursing education in Europe with regard to aspects of digitialisation are very similar. At the same time, there are hardly any tools in the form of 'Take Care' in the international arena. In order to support prospective nursing staff in the training of clinical decision-making and to train digital skills, we plan to further develop the tool for nursing education contexts on a European scale, adapting its situations to other countries. The game can be used in a multiplier mode that ensures that players can support each other. Players will be sensitized to recognize special needs of others in order to see that they will profit themselves through supporting others. The consortium will consist of a university as the coordinator with expertise in the field of nursing education and pedagogical methods (Germany), an SME with expertise in software development and serious game design (Germany), a school with practical teaching experience (Austria), a dementia care unit with practical work experience (Estonia) and a school with the opportunity to use the app on a large scale and to disseminate it widely (Ireland). In a first step, the curricula of the partner countries are analysed with regard to the topics contained in the game in the context of dementia. Another focus of the analysis is the systematic training of technical competence in the curricula of the partner countries. Further analyses with a view to uniform competences throughout Europe will be carried out on the basis of project synopses in the context of occupational mobility in Europe. The game concept will be further developed along the analysis results. Storylines and dialogues will then be adapted and further developed and translated into English. The iterative further development of the learning game will take place along the testing of the learning tool in institutions of project partners. At the end, the learning tool will be made available as a free app through Google Play and the Apple App Store. In addition, the project results will be presented and discussed in workshops at various international care education congresses. In the project a document analyses of relevant curricula and a project synopsis on nursing competences in the context of the topics of the learning game will be carried out. The synthesis of the results leads to the further development of the underlying pedagogic concept. The adaptation of the concept will be discussed and agreed with experts from different countries in focus groups. The testing of the adaptations of the tool will be carried out with learners from the partner countries' institutions. We use an innovative approach for addressing the student groups through attractive digital training opportunities that take into account individuals needs and expectations. Furthermore we would expect that learners can be supported individually (keyword learning analytics), but also that a critic
The project was intended to contribute to the establishment of innovative educational approaches and digital technologies for nursing education contexts in Europe and to provide a concrete application that is openly accessible and can be used throughout Europe. With the further development of the serious game "Take Care", nursing-specific competence development in the area of clinical decision-making should be supported, which has not yet been addressed internationally with digital support. The project results should make it possible to digitally depict complex nursing cases in inpatient long-term care in order to support the training of professionally relevant competences of decision-making via digitally simulated, but authentic and practical work environments relieved of action pressure. The project work also aimed to start a discourse among the European project partners on the relationship between evidence-based knowledge and social-communicative and critical-reflexive competences in contexts of digitally supported nursing education using the example of the serious game "Take Care".
With the project work, the consortium intended to provide an innovative serious game for nursing education (Take Care) in the European education area and to promote the European discussion on digitally supported approaches to nursing education. The serious game "Take Care" should be further developed in such a way that it is compatible and accessible for all European nursing education contexts for the development of profession-specific competences. At the time of the application, serious games for nursing education and international professional discourses on the topic were hardly established in Europe. With the serious game "Take Care", an approach was chosen that explicitly supports the training of clinical decision-making competences in nursing. In addition to professional competences, social-communicative and critical-reflexive competences in particular were to be trained in a playful and digitally supported way. The aim of the discussion among the European project partners was to discuss the relevance of serious games for the training of professional competences in nursing education, taking into account different regulatory frameworks.