Alexandra Holloway
10/20/2010 09:00 AM
Computer Engineering
The experience of childbirth is highly individualized. Proper preparation and support before, during, and after the onset of labor is key to shortening labor, decreasing the need for interventions during labor, and ultimately increasing maternal happiness. This thesis reports the evolution of the design of \PP{} as well as its evaluation as a learning aid. The Prepared Partner is an educational video game about labor and childbirth, with goals to introduce natural ways to help a woman in labor, and their effects on labor; to introduce the mechanics of labor and childbirth; to practice interacting with a woman in labor; and to simulate the stages of labor. Designing a successful serious game requires collaboration between two or more vastly different domains: the theme or themes of the game, and the field of game design, usability, and testing. Collaboration between the fields, evaluation, and re-design must span the whole design-development cycle. We show how frequent and iterative interdisciplinary collaboration made for a successful educational game in design and development of The Prepared Partner. We present a simple and novel way to model a woman in labor, and show that we achieved our goals. The user evaluation of The Prepared Partner showed an overwhelming majority of positive responses to the subjective portion of the study. Quantitative analysis showed participants performed significantly better on a post-test about labor and childbirth than on a pre-test (p<0.01).
