TBI-SIM : A research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

A research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

Nicolas Szilas (TECFA, University of Geneva) and Jean Dumas (UPCD, University of Geneva)

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of disability and has a devastating impact on all family members: adults who must care for the injured person, as well as children or adolescents whose parent or sibling has been injured. Although families in developed countries can turn to a variety of resources to help them cope (e.g., educational materials, individual or group counseling, support groups), most of those resources target injured persons or adult caregivers, rather than uninjured youths.

This research project proposes to design, develop, and evaluate web-based learning simulations that integrate educational materials for uninjured youths aged 12 to 19 years who have a parent or sibling with a TBI. The planned research will establish the scientific, pedagogical, and technological merit of creating these simulations and of presenting them on a web platform designed to help uninjured youths bolster their problem solving skills and their psychological adjustment. The research has four aims:

Aim 1 is to assess the psychological needs of uninjured youths faced with a parent or sibling’s TBI. Informed by an existing theory of coping competence in children and adolescents, this assessment will rely on focus groups (conducted separately with uninjured youths, parents, and service providers) and on individual interviews with uninjured youths and parents. These assessments will be used to develop educational materials to meet the psychological needs of uninjured youths.
Aim 2 is to deliver the educational materials created in Aim 1 by relying on computer-generated learning simulations, in which youths can play the role of virtual characters in short pedagogical stories, and to integrate these simulations on a web-based platform.
Aim 3 is to collect qualitative and quantitative data to assess the suitability of the platform’s contents and presentation, and to make adjustments in light of the data.
Aim 4 is to conduct an experimental study of the platform’s efficacy in a dynamic wait-list design that will evaluate the platform’s impact on the problem solving skills and psychological adjustment of uninjured youths who have a parent or sibling with a TBI.

Computer-generated learning simulations: The Interactive Drama Engine

We use IDtension, a highly interactive drama engine, to develop an interactive game.

In this game young users play the role of Frank, who has to manage all-day-situations with Paul, his father, who suffers from a TBI. The scenarios are inspired by focus groups conducted with people who live with a family member suffering from TBI. he attractiveness of IDtension is its generative nature. Its architecture is much more flexible than that of narrative programs that depend on fully-scripted screenplays, and the stories it produces much more believable because they can evolve in multiple, at times unexpected ways. As IDtension generates scenes interactively, they cannot be described explicitly as in a story graph. This means that the term “scenario” does not refer here to a fully-scripted sequence of events (as in story graphs or movies), but to all the narrative materials available to the computer engine to dynamically produce the learning simulation.

Public demonstration

We made a public demonstration during the 100th anniversary celebration of the faculty of psychology of the university of Geneva, the 5th of may 2012. A few youths have been playing our game during this day and they showed both curiosity and interest.

Publications

Structural Writing, a Design Principle for Interactive Drama. Szilas, N., Richle, U., and Dumas, J. ICIDS 2012 November 12nd-15th, 2012, San Sebastian, Spain

3-D Simulated Interactive Drama for Teenagers coping with a traumatic brain injury in a Parent. Habonneau, N., Richle, U., Szilas, N., and Dumas, J. ICIDS 2012 November 12nd-15th, 2012, San Sebastian, Spain

Structures for Interactive Narrative: An authored-centred approach. Szilas, N., Richle, U., and Petta, P. (2012). Technical Report TECFA-12-1, Jan. 2012.

Educational narrative games with choice: the simula family. Nicolas Szilas, Thomas Boggini, Urs Richle, and Jean E. Dumas. 2011. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE '11), Teresa Romão, Nuno Correia, Masahiko Inami, Hirokasu Kato, Rui Prada, Tsutomu Terada, Eduardo Dias, and Teresa Chambel (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 82 , 2 pages. DOI=10.1145/2071423.2071523 - Link here

Using Highly Interactive Drama to Help Young People Cope with Traumatic Situations. Demo and Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Third Joint Conference on Interactive Storytelling, ICIDS 2010, Edinburgh, UK, November 2010. Ruth Aylett, Mei Yii Lim, Sandy Lochart, Paolo Petta, Mark Riedl, Interactive Storytelling, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 2010. ISBN: 3-642-16637-7

Interactive Simulations to Help Teenagers Cope When a Parent Has a Traumatic Brain Injury. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainement Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, November 2010

Collaborators

Nicolas Habonneau, TECFA, Unige
Urs Richle, TECFA, Unige

Dates

This research project lasts from January 2010 to December 2012.