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The knowledge and the implementation of patients' rights are fundamental in health professional practices. Courses for healthcare students are often taught using a lecture format. Yet, students find it difficult to understand the importance of legal concepts and apply it to their future practice. In order to promote learner centered teaching practices and encourage knowledge acquisition and practical skills development, the “Patient's Rights & Innovative Teaching Strategy (PRITS)” project aimed at developing a serious game dedicated to patients' rights education. To design and develop this serious game and the associated learning concept, we set up a multidisciplinary team of experts from the fields of healthcare, law, education and engineering. A collaborative methodology was used to ensure the coherent development of all games and learning elements. The PRITS serious game integrates knowledge about patients' rights into dialogues with virtual patients. It also provides additional resources and exercises related to the topics. The learning experience intends to challenge students' mental models and support a transition from “quality of care only” to “quality of care and respect of patients' rights”.

In the last decade, the use of serious games as a teaching and learning tool has steadily increased in many disciplines. Nevertheless, serious games are still facing crucial challenges, such as their integration in the global learning process. On the other hand, with the increased adoption of online applications and courses, it is becoming possible to collect and centralize large amounts of trace data generated by players. Such data may be used to produce statistics on students’ behaviors inside pedagogical serious games, both as individuals and aggregated as groups (e.g., classrooms). In this paper we propose a classification of potential uses of statistics in serious games and give new insights into how statistical analysis of groups’ behavior may impact positively on the learning process. We also present experimental results obtained during a large-scale game deployment using the Wegas platform, our open source platform for game authoring and execution.

In the last decades, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has obtained a high level of success. Interactions between NLP and Serious Games have started and some of them already include NLP techniques. The objectives of this paper are twofold: on the one hand, providing a simple framework to enable analysis of potential uses of NLP in Serious Games and, on the other hand, applying the NLP framework to existing Serious Games and giving an overview of the use of NLP in pedagogical Serious Games. In this paper we present 11 serious games exploiting NLP techniques. We present them systematically, according to the following structure: first, we highlight possible uses of NLP techniques in Serious Games, second, we describe the type of NLP implemented in the each specific Serious Game and, third, we provide a link to possible purposes of use for the different actors interacting in the Serious Game.

Previous researches in pedagogy and project management have already underlined the positive contribution of serious games on project management courses. However, the empirical outcome of their studies has not been translated yet into functional and technical specifications for “serious games” designers. Our study aims at obtaining a set of technical and functional design guidelines for serious game scenario editors to be used in large classes of project management students. We have conceived a framework to assess the influence of different serious games components over student’s perceived acquired competency. Such frameworks will allow us to develop a software module for reflective learning, which is meant to extend theory of serious games design.