A Pedagogical Virtual Reality Serious Game Tool for the Development of Emotional Competencies to Nursing Students

For nursing students it is very important to develop emotional competencies, as their jobs are usually in environments of high stress and tiredness. Such environments place an emotional burden on the health professional, so it is important to promote the development of skills that help them to identify, manage and understand emotions. Although this ability is a useful skill in any context, for nursing students this learning has been overlooked in their training. With the help of a Serious Game, such learning can be important because it allows an active and critical approach through active experimentation. Virtual Reality (VR) can be explored to attract the attention of students, by offering a space that presents specific tasks to the educational theme, with the objective of developing new skills, as in the case of this project, emotional competencies. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a Serious Game in VR may contribute as a pedagogical tool for students in the 4th year of the Bachelors in the Nursing Degree at Minho University, Portugal.