Project and Preliminary Evaluation of VR-MED, a Domain-Specific Language for Serious Games in Family Medicine Teaching

Serious games can be used for training in different areas, like Education and Medicine. In these contexts, it is hard to define game-based learning environments, because this process requires intensive interaction between experts and developers in order to establish common, comprehensible and reusable elements for different projects by both professionals. A domain-specific language (DSL) tends to solve some modelling problems such as the creation and documentation of rules and the reuse of components. This paper presents VR-MED, a graphical DSL prototype for serious games, focused on teaching of Family Medicine. Using a visual notation, developers and healthcare professionals can create simple games based on textual medical cases. A preliminary study shows VR-MED as an adequate DSL to represent Family Medicine elements in a serious game, and that it can be extended to support new medical cases.