Designing serious games for learning support in medicine studies: A specific method to elicit and formalize requirements

In Spain, the new Medicine degrees of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) have incorporated Information Technologies (IT) subjects to develop horizontal competences in their curriculum. Medicine Studies are costly for Higher Education (HE) institutions and, then, every cost-effective educational innovation is welcomed. There are different general approaches for designing and developing serious games in general, but specific target disciplines as Medicine (educational and professional training), lack of tailor-made methodologies, even in eliciting requirements under the Requirements Engineering (RE) framework, as a subfield of Software Engineering. In medical higher education, the main objective of using games is to engage learners in complex problem spaces that replicate real world situations, as it happens in hospital emergencies, surgery operations and so on, without the constraints and risks of the day to day practice (patient injuries, health complications and death). Therefore, the development of serious HE games is a complex, time consuming and costly process, especially for learning medical skills. In this Work in Progress, we address the problem of lacking suitable methodologies in the design and development processes of educational serious games for HE medical environments. Our proposal is a semi-formal and simple method to elicit and formalize the specific teaching needs identified in subjects or practices of Medicine degrees, in order to design and develop serious games based on sound educational principles and theories and on RE rules.