Technology and education in nursing: an experimental study towards gameability, student's autonomy and learning styles

INTRODUCTION: Based on the importance of professional qualification for nurses and preterm newborns’ care, taking into account the analysis of child mortality in the world, we have developed a serious game as an educational technological tool to facilitate learning in neonatal nursing. The serious game e-Baby: skin integrity is a digital tool which objective is to offer students the possibility to perform clinical evaluation and provide care to the premature baby in a virtual simulation, before he/she does it in a real baby in the scenario of practice. So, the students can make mistakes and reflect on them until comprehension is fully reached and the skills improved in a safe environment. Besides, technologies must be linked to the educational context and goals, respecting the different learning styles. OBJECTIVE: Evaluate the impact of the serious game e-Baby: skin integrity in the cognitive learning of nursing students, considering the learning styles. METHOD: It is a methodological research as the development of the technology and randomized experimental research because it evaluated the impact on students’ learning, with participation of other Brazilian universities. It was offered an extracurricular and blended course to the participants which responded to evaluations of pre and post-test, characterization questionnaire, learning style index, evaluation of the serious game and the course, following ethical in research precepts. The participants were divided into control and experimental groups, randomly. The course’s theme was the clinical evaluation of a preterm newborn and the proper interventions about the need of tissue integrity focused on skin, in alignment with the developed serious game. It was used parametrical analysis Student t, considering normal distribution, using also tests as Chi-square and exact of Fisher in certain variables. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: Serious game e-Baby: skin integrity is an innovative technology, validated by experts in usability heuristics of interface, educational elements, content, gameability and multimedia. It was considered relevant to support nursing students’ learning in neonatology and its general evaluation given by students was highly satisfactory regardless their learning styles, indicating that, in spite of specificities and preferences of different users, it is a versatile tool to use in nursing education. This study corroborates literature indicating students’ preferences for technological innovation and adhesion to devices and tools already inserted and popular in our society context. Preferred teaching strategies by the sample demonstrate its interest for problem resolution, active role and tasks clearly linked to the nurses’ practice, reinforcing the potential success of the paradigm change in higher education from traditional model to the adoption of students-centered new theories. E-Baby did not present statistical difference in cognitive learning between the groups, despite it reflected on better scores for experimental group when adopting arithmetic mean. CONCLUSION: Despite the serious game did not represent impact in cognitive learning of nursing students, it was highly accepted by the sample regardless learning styles and validated by experts. Its main characteristics given by participants were: didactical, stimulating to access other digital tools in the course, educative as it offers immediate feedback and supportive for learning in the perception of students.