The+Blood+Typing+Game+-+Kathryn

=The Blood Typing Game - at www.nobelprize.org=

This game is from Nobelprize.org, the "official web site of the Nobel Prize". They have many medicine prize related games, as well as other categories, such as Lord of the Flies!

media type="youtube" key="3T558hMytIs" width="560" height="315" The learning included vocabulary and the basics of blood typing and blood transfusions.



You needed to learn the basics and then apply that knowledge to giving accident victims the correct blood types to save them. The animation was pretty strange looking and they made horrible noises if you gave them the wrong blood!

I played the short version, which still took a while. There is also a much longer version with missions, where you can save your progress and come back. You have to pass each level to unlock the next one.

This game contained many learning principles, specifically:

I wasn't going to kill anyone (real)!
 * Psychosocial Moratorium” Principle** – Learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered.

I could keep on trying!
 * Practice Principle** – Learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice is not boring (i.e. in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success.

I may have created this myself, in that I did not do all of the tutorials before beginning to save people. Because of this, I had to figure out why some blood types could go together, while some couldn't. I eventually figured out the pattern once I was brave enough to keep killing people!
 * Probing Principle** – Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting in and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; re-probing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis.

The game would teach you something and then have you practice it. I think you could have learned the whole pattern to blood typing without being able to read!
 * Text Principle** – Texts are not understood purely verbally (i.e. only in terms of the definitions of the words in the text and their text-internal relationships to each other) but are understood in terms of embodied experiences. Learners move back and forth between texts and embodied experiences. More purely verbal understanding (reading texts apart from embodied experiences) comes only when learners have had enough embodied experiences in the domain and ample experiences with similar texts.

There was definitely more than just words. The animated pictures helped a lot.
 * Multimodal Principle** – Meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalities (images, texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.) not just words.

The player learned the blood typing in a simple format before working with patients.
 * Subset Principle** – Learning even at its start takes place in a (simplified) subset of the real domain.

This would be a great game to use in a high school biology class. I would encourage students to go straight to saving patients and see if they could figure out the pattern to the blood typing. I think that having a chance to figure it out on your own gives you the motivation to do the reading and experimenting in the tutorial. I wouldn't want students to become too frustrated, but a little mystery would give them the incentive to learn the material.

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