Abstract:

Introduction:
Digital educational Technologies can offer a more flexible, attractive, interactive and collaborative learning-teaching experience (Freitas et al., 2012). Serious games (educational games) present advanced technology and allow clinical practice simulation of several subjects in health field through a virtual environment (Fonseca et al., 2015). If these games include emotional aspects, they allow users’ affective experiences in the interaction named human-product, following the nowadays and innovative cybernetic trend in the perspective of emotional design.

Objectives:
Evaluate the impact of use of serious game e-Baby over Portuguese and Brazilian nursing students’ emotions, through indirect measurement; and reflect about the convergence of emotional design present in this educational technology into new paradigms in nursing education.

Method:
Descriptive study with theory-methodology approach based on significant learning and emotional design. The e-Baby game simulates clinical assessment of preterm newborns, and this study evaluated its integration with users’ emotions through LEMtool® online instrument. It measures four positive emotions (happiness, desire, fascination and satisfaction) and four negative emotions (sadness, boredom and dissatisfaction) through an avatar. The sample was 42 nursing students (28 from Brazil and 14 from Portugal).

Results:
The students clicked 474 times in serious games’ screens to evaluate their emotion in each one, and the actions were divided between two different modules of the game: oxygenation (284 clicks from Portuguese and 190 from Brazilian students) and circulation (235 clicks, module evaluated only by Brazilian students). Among the positive emotions in oxygenation, fascination was the more evident for Portuguese students (27.8%) and desire was the main emotion for Brazilian students corresponding to 32% of all clicks. In circulation module, with only Brazilian students’ evaluation, fascination was the highlighted emotion corresponding to 31%. Regarding negative emotions, sadness was the more frequently cited by the total sample: 10% by Brazilian and 7.7% by Portuguese students in oxygenation module, and 13% regarding circulation module.

Conclusions:
The e-Baby presented to be a game aligned with emotional design, provoking more positive than negative emotions in the students, due to human-computer interaction. Emotion focused design for digital educational technologies must be interesting to accomplish learning goals. If the student is emotionally integrated to the learning tool, he/she will potentially feel responsible for the clinical evaluation performed on preterm newborns in the virtual environment, interacting in a positive way with the developed game. Therefore, this study contributes with reflexions about educational technologies’ creation process and use, integrating users’ emotions to the product and learning strategy.

References:
[1] Norman, D.A. Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. New York, NH: Basic Books; 2008.
[2] Fonseca, L.M.M., Aredes, N.D.A., Dias, D.M.V., Scochi, C.G.S., Martins, J.C.A., Rodrigues, M.A. (2015). Serious game e-baby: percepção dos estudantes de enfermagem sobre a aprendizagem da avaliação clínica do bebê prematuro. Rev Bras Enferm, 68 (1), 13-19.
Financial support: FAPESP. CNPq.

Keywords:

Emotional design, Neonatal nursing, Educational Technology, Learning.