more on training in MCH: Games For Health

If you missed class yesterday (and, considering attendance, chances are you did!), you really missed out on a great discussion of training and supervision. For the class exercise, students learned to suture oranges via written, second hand verbal, and expert verbal instructions. The surprising results showed that a person taught by second hand knowledge (the community health worker previously trained by an expert) did as well as the person taught by the expert herself. The person taught by written instruction only, well, floundered.

One of the more interesting topics was the new frontier of training opportunities via the internet. With OLPC, the opportunities are exploding for connectivity in previously unreachable settings from dense slums to rural desert villages. We aren't the only ones who think this can be huge--the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation launched an $8.25m campaign to research just this type of thing! The announcement comes via the Serious Games Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. What a dream job:

Games For Health:

"The Serious Games Initiative founded Games for Health to develop a community and best practices platform for the numerous games being built for health care applications. To date the project has brought together researchers, medical professionals, and game developers to share information about the impact games and game technologies can have on health care and policy."