Tag Archives: marjorie zielke

Two nursing education research projects developed by the Institute for Interactive Arts and Engineering (IIAE) at UT Dallas in collaboration with the UT Arlington College of Nursing have received national and state recognition this spring.

One project — “Can Game Play Teach Student Nurses How to Save Lives?” — has been named a 2012 Computerworld Honors Laureate. This game-based simulation uses 3D infant patients in a synthetic environment to give undergraduate nursing students virtual clinical

One project — “Can Game Play Teach Student Nurses How to Save Lives?” — has been named a 2012 Computerworld Honors Laureate.  This game-based simulation uses 3D infant patients in a synthetic environment to give undergraduate nursing students virtual clinical practice opportunities.  The project was funded through a UT System Transforming Undergraduate Education grant. It will be recognized for its applications of information technology to promote positive social, economic and educational change at the Computerworld Laureate Medal Ceremony and Gala Evening on June 4 in Washington, D.C.

A second research project, NursingAP.com, tied for first place as Best Demonstration Project at the “Innovations in Health Science Education” conference sponsored by the University of Texas Academy of Health Science Education. The recognition is voted on by attendees at the conference, which is sponsored by the six health science campuses within the UT System.

A project called “Can Game Play Teach Student Nurses How to Save Lives?" uses 3D infant patients in a synthetic environment.

NursingAP.com is a blended-learning website that incorporates interactive technology and virtual environments to assist graduate students seeking nurse practitioner degrees and certifications. The project started with neonatal nurse practitioner (NNP) curriculum.   The project is funded by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration.

NursingAP.com affords students opportunities to practice the knowledge acquired through lecture material through the use of interactive modules and a 3D virtual Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). The components of the NNP curriculum are presented through lecture notes with embedded media, and a variety of other multimedia forms, including videos, interactive games, simulations and virtual equipment demonstrations.  Students can practice clinical skills in the virtual NICU, an immersive environment where 3D patients present medical conditions covered in lecture content.

The project gives undergraduate nursing students virtual clinical practice opportunities.

Both projects are research collaborations between Dr. Marjorie A. Zielke, in Arts and Technology assistant professor and the associate director of IIAE, and Dr. Judy LeFlore, professor at the UT Arlington College of Nursing.  “These continual awards reinforce the deep talent of our student developers,” Dr. Zielke said.  “I also think we need to give a great deal of credit to our strong collaboration with the UT Arlington College of Nursing.”

“I am particularly proud of the scope of the recognition we are receiving from international conferences to internal recognition by the UT System Health Science campuses,” Dr. Zielke continued.

At the Computerworld awards dinner, the UT System project will be presented with a medallion inscribed with the program’s mission statement, “A Search for New Heroes.”

“The Computerworld Honors program was especially competitive this year, as more than 500 IT initiatives were nominated for their innovation and benefit to society,” said Julia King, executive editor of events for Computerworld.

These new honors are just two of the several awards received by IIAE projects over the past two years.  The UT System project also received a first place award for Emerging and Innovative Technology and Methods at the 2011 International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare (IMSH). The simulation was used in a randomized, controlled study designed to compare the clinical application of undergraduate nursing students using a virtual clinical experience compared to students receiving the same pediatric respiratory content in traditional lecture format. Results of the study were published this spring in Simulation in Healthcare, the journal of the Society of Simulation in Healthcare.  Another project, The First Person Cultural Trainer (FPCT) won first place in the government category of the Serious Games Showcase at the Interservice/Interindustry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando in December 2011.  Earlier in 2011, FPCT earned first-place in the Innovations in DoD Gaming Competition at the 2011 Defense GameTech Users’ Conference also in Orlando.

The Arts and Technology program will participate in a high-tech, 24-hour international multimedia show honoring the father of computer science, Alan Turing.

On March 23 and 24, UT Dallas Arts and Technology faculty members Dr. Marjorie Zielke and Dr. Roger Malina, professor Judy LeFlore of University of Texas at Arlington and ATEC students Sanger Doane and Steven “Slade” Jansa, will participate as virtual Texans in a worldwide streaming extravaganza celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing.

Alan Turing’s accomplishments made a fundamental impact on the development of the computer and to our contemporary networked digital culture.

Alan Turing is sometimes called the father of computer science.  In 1935, at the age of 23 he invented the concept of abstract computing machines – now known simply as Turing machines - on which all subsequent stored-program digital computers are modeled.

Turing also pioneered the field of artificial intelligence, and he developed the idea what is now called the “Turing Test,” a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior.

The UT Dallas ATEC program has a number of award winning research and development initiatives which seek to create virtual environments with virtual humans for applications in health care and education.

With colleague Dr. Judy LeFlore, associate professor at the University of Texas at Arlington College of Nursing, the ATEC team has developed a serious game to teach undergraduate nurses how to treat respiratory distress in infants, a health-care professional assessment program for a local hospital, and a full online nurse practitioner curriculum for neonates.

These projects have won a variety of awards, to include first place at the 11th International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare (IMSH) in the category of Emerging and Innovative Technologies and Methods in January 2011 and most recently in February 2012 a tie for first-place demonstration at the Eighth Annual Innovations in Health Science Education Conference, sponsored by the University of Texas Academy of Health Science Education.

These Virtual Texans from ATEC projects will be participating in the worldwide celebration Decode/Recode.

Decode/Recode is globally networked interactive event celebrating the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth, as part of the official opening of the University of Salford building at MediaCity, England on March 23. For this event ATEC will be connecting for 24 hours with 24 partners in a worldwide live digital media performance.

Honor is Arts and Technology Research Project’s Third National Honor in 2 Years

For the third time in two years, the First Person Cultural Trainer (FPCT), a research project from the UT Dallas Arts and Technology(ATEC) program, has won a national award for serious gaming.

The First Person Cultural Trainer game designed by ATEC simulates the challenges a soldier might encounter on patrol in a village.

FPCT received the Best Game award in the Government Category of the 2011 Serious Games Showcase and Challenge. FPCT is sponsored by U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command G-2 Intelligence Support (TRADOC).  The Serious Games Showcase is part of the Interservice/Interindustry Training and Simulation Education Conference (I/ITSEC), and was held in Orlando, Fla., from November 28 through December 1.

Earlier in 2011, FPCT earned first place in the Innovations in DoD Gaming Competition at the GameTech Users’ Conference  in Orlando. In 2010, FPCT won the cross-function award from the National Training and Simulation Association (NTSA).

FPCT is a four-level immersive game that allows Army leaders and other appropriate personnel to practice culturally correct ways of interacting with different populations around the world.  The game features a variety of innovations, like a branching conversation system and methods for displaying nonverbal communication and environmental perception. The program can also be ported to different game engines with minimal redevelopment.

The video game simulates conversations with people that a soldier might meet, in this case a village elder.

More than 50 games were entered in the I/ITSEC Serious Games contest, which had five categories – government, business, student, mobile and a special category, adaptive stance.  The work was reviewed by a panel of military, academic and industry gaming experts.  About 20,000 government, business, military and academic total registrants attend I/ITSEC every year. The conference is widely considered to be the largest and most competitive worldwide in modeling and simulation.

“This honor and the overall visibility that FPCT, UT Dallas and ATEC received at I/ITSEC this year is a real tribute to our sponsors at TRADOC, students,  faculty, project staff and administrators who have nurtured this project for going on four years,” said Dr. Marjorie Zielke, ATEC assistant professor.

Zielke is the associate director of the Institute for Interactive Arts and Engineering (IIAE) and principal investigator of the FPCT project.  Other faculty co-investigators on the project include Dr. Frank Dufour, assistant professor and director of the ATEC PhD program; Dr. Gopal Gupta, professor and head of the UT Dallas computer science department; and Dr. Thomas Linehan, professor and director of ATEC and the IIAE.  More than 20 students,  staff and faculty worked on the project for this development phase. The project has employed many more undergraduate, masters and PhD student developers over its four-year life cycle.

The FPCT captures the sights and sounds of life in a specific deployment area.

As part of the award, the development team received a kiosk display area at the conference where live gameplay was demonstrated to the large conference delegation.  Key developers from ATEC serious games projects gave demonstrations throughout the entire conference.

The developers were able to show the game to key government and business entities involved in modeling and simulation, including a representative from the White House, who visited the Serious Games pavilion to learn about national and international research in serious games.

In addition to winning the award, Zielke, Dufour and ATEC  Research Manager Gary Hardee presented a paper titled  “Creating Micro-expressions and Nuanced Nonverbal Communication in Synthetic Cultural Characters and Environments,” which highlighted some of the new FPCT development recently completed in October.

Researchers from UT Dallas and the UT Arlington College of Nursing have created a virtual environment where graduate students can train online for the medical challenges that await them in the real world.

NursingAP.com is designed to help Advanced Practice Nursing students hone critical skills interactively, on their own schedules via distance learning.

Dr. Marjorie Zielke

“Medical simulation offers the potential to be critical technology for many reasons,” says Dr. Marjorie Zielke, assistant professor of Arts and Technology (ATEC) at UT Dallas and principal investigator for the site’s technology design.  “We can train nurses more quickly, leverage doctoral-level faculty, train on rare but potentially fatal conditions and ultimately save lives. It allows nursing students from remote locations to practice in a controlled, reduced-risk, cost-effective environment.”

Researchers believe this emerging field of virtual gaming medical simulation can improve the accuracy and speed of cognitive and behavioral skills, better preparing nursing students for real-life situations.

A medical care environment complete with virtual babies and nurses helps students prepare for critical situations.

“We have seen some promising results from a randomized study we conducted in the spring of this year,” said Dr. Judy LeFlore, associate professor of nursing at UT Arlington and principal investigator for the project. “Game students (in an experimental group) were more likely to select the right intervention and do it in a more timely manner compared to the lecture only group (control group). However, more research is needed to assure cognitive, behavioral, and/or psychomotor knowledge obtained in the virtual world can successfully be translated into the physical world.”

NursingAP.com is funded by a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and serves as both a supplement to traditional classroom instruction and a potential resource for the ongoing education of working professionals in the future.

LeFlore and Zielke submitted a research abstract about their project, titled, “Can Game Play Teach Student Nurses How To Save Lives: An Undergraduate Training Proposal for Student Nurses in Pediatric Respiratory Diseases with a Living World Gaming Construct,” to the 11^th International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare (IMSH), and placed first in the topic category of Emerging and Innovative Technologies & Methods.

Information screens on the NursingAP.com site guide students with both pictures and text.

The initial phase of NursingAP.com is focused on Neonatal Nurse Practitioner training, with subject matter covering conditions in newborns and babies under 2 years old. The training consists of three components:

• Lectures by subject matter experts like LeFlore, which lend a human intelligence component and provide guidance and content.
• Complex interactives, such as the virtual ventilator, which allow for specific training exercises and familiarity with equipment.
• The immersive game itself, “Virtual NICU,” in which the interactive equipment appears in context, allowing nursing students to feel they are actually practicing on a patient in a virtual hospital setting.

In the game, students make decisions within their scope of responsibility on a variety of neonatal conditions.   The virtual environment allows for endless practice and a variety of scenarios in a risk-free environment that can be altered to create dilemmas that can’t be found in a textbook. The student can “feel” tired or stressed, or might have to deal with the virtual patient’s family – all real-life situations that a nurse would have to handle. Such an emphasis on psychological, behavioral and social modeling is unique, providing a distinctive teaching modality that may be used in conjunction with physical simulation, says LeFlore.

But Zielke makes it clear that simulation and virtual patients should not substitute for  traditional lectures and practicum – they simply provide another avenue of learning. She says, “I received my PhD at age 52. So I came in with much more industry experience than 20-something students who got their degrees straight out of college. I might gain more knowledge from the interactive game than from the lectures, simply because of what I already knew coming in.”

That’s one of the unique characteristics of the site – students can enter the program from different navigations, experience levels and perspectives, but will still gain the pertinent knowledge and skills they need. A system of learning metrics and usage patterns are in place to help aggregately track students’ progress and show professors how they are using the materials. The instructors are able to gauge the effectiveness of a variety of different learning modules, to determine what works best for each student.

NursingAP.com provides more than 60 lectures accompanied by dynamic learning modules designed to appeal to various learning styles. All lecture content and interactive courseware meets the core requirements defined by the National Certification Corporation and the National Association of Neonatal Nurses. Researchers are hopeful that the neonatal platform will be applied to other medical issues in the future.

A training tool being developed by a research team from the Arts and Technology (ATEC) program may soon make it easier for military service men and women to perform their missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The project offers virtual villages for soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan to practice their training skills.

Dr. Marjorie Zielke, the principal investigator on the project, holds the award plaque with her co-investigators, Dr. Thomas Linehan (left), director of Arts and Technology at UT Dallas; and Dr. Frank DuFour, assistant professor of sound design.

“The work we’re doing has to do with the facilitation of cultural training,” said Dr. Marjorie Zielke, an assistant professor in the ATEC program and the principal investigator on the project.  “The way some of that training has been done in the past and may still be done in certain areas is to build actual villages and hire actors to replicate a particular culture,”  Zielke said. “That kind of approach has some limitations in the sense that it’s expensive, not everyone can attend, it’s not easily changed because it’s a physical structure, you have to work with actual actors, and so forth.”

The ATEC team set out to re-create  a realistic virtual environment instead.  The result is First Person Cultural Trainer (FPCT), a 3D interactive game that  teaches soldiers the values and norms of Iraqi and Afghan cultures.  FPCT is a serious game, which means that it is designed for purposes other than pure entertainment, in this case, cultural training.

Players enter the community from the first-person point of view and collect information based on verbal and non-verbal cues observed in characters encountered along the way.

FPCT recently won the Cross-Function Team Award at the 2010 Modeling & Simulation Leadership Summit, held in Virginia Beach. Presented annually by the National Training & Simulation Association (NTSA), the Modeling & Simulation (M&S) Awards recognize achievement in the M&S functional areas of training, analysis and acquisition, and in support of the overall M&S effort.

First Person Cultural Trainer was also a finalist at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Florida in early December.  I/ITSEC promotes cooperation among the armed services, industry, academia and various government agencies in pursuit of improved training and education programs.

Zielke says ATEC has been working in the cultural training and simulation area for about three years, with about 15 students – at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels – working on this project.  Her co-investigators are Dr. Thomas Linehan, Endowed Chair and director of Arts and Technology at UT Dallas; and Dr. Frank DuFour, assistant professor of sound design.

The project team conducted extensive research to get the characters to look, sound and act like the culture they’re representing.

“Much of the cultural data is being developed in real time by the military,” Zielke said.  “By having it in a systems-based approach that is composable — in other words, we can generate culture in certain aspects of the game on the fly — we can respond to the data as soon as it becomes available.  We could change it overnight if we needed to.”

The project is supported and sponsored by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) G-2 Intelligence Support Activity (TRISA).

“This prototype, now on its way to a full-fledged model, is a highly flexible tool for training battle staffs and individual soldiers at the tactical level,” said Mel Cape, senior knowledge engineer for TRADOC G2. “The recognition [the UT Dallas team] has received within the modeling and simulation community is well deserved, and we at TRISA are proud of their superlative efforts in the development of a culturally-based training device.”

Part of this cultural training is to familiarize soldiers with what they will face when arriving in their theaters of operation. Researchers worked to make the game’s characters look, sound and act as much as possible like people from the culture they represent.

The project offers virtual villages for soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan to practice their training skills.

In the game, the player enters a community from the first-person point of view.  He doesn’t know much about the community, how the people feel about him, or who the key figures are in the village. The goal is to move through the community and try to understand the social structures and issues, then address those issues and work with the community to affect missions.

The people in the community form opinions about the player based on how the player treats them.  If the player doesn’t interact properly with them, the villagers discuss his behavior among themselves.  Some individuals in the village have more clout than others.

The player collects information based on verbal and non-verbal cues he observes in the characters he encounters and then rates those characters based on a scale of four emotions: anger, fear, gladness and neutrality.

One of the most rewarding aspects of this program for Zielke is the opportunity to help her students make connections within the industry. “Between this project and other similar projects in the ATEC program, we have at least 30 students employed at any given time,” she said. “The students develop great portfolios, gain work experience, go to conferences, write research papers based on an incredibly rich data set and then hopefully leverage all of those things to get industry jobs.”

Assistant Professor Marjorie Zielke has been awarded a three-year, $350,000 grant to create online training in neonatal nursing through an ongoing collaboration with the UT Arlington School of Nursing (UTASON).

“Student learning will be enriched by faculty perspectives from across the country,” Marjorie Zielke said of her project.

Zielke, with Arts and Technology (ATEC) faculty members Monica Evans, Frank Dufour and Todd Fechter, will build a Web site that allows student nurses to be taught concurrently by faculty from Dartmouth University, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, the University of Texas at Arlington and Stony Brook University School of Nursing in New York.  The new research enhances subject matter review and creates a more portable learning experience.

“Student learning will be enriched by faculty perspectives from across the country,” said Zielke. “Students also will benefit from the social community of other graduate-level nursing students through this virtual learning environment.”

The course subject matter covers conditions in fetuses and babies under 2 years old.  Students can download a lecture as a podcast or video, and then follow up with a virtual examination of an infant in a no-risk environment. The virtual environment allows for endless practice and limitless scenarios in a risk-free environment. For instance, the instructor can program symptoms such as respiratory distress into a 3D model, rather than teach based on the conditions of patients visiting a clinic or hospital on a given day.

ATEC students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels also will participate in this project, performing research, modeling, animation, story development and computer programming.

Research project sponsors are the UTASON, with principal investigator Dr. Judy Leflore, and the Health Resources and Services Administration.

Professor Zielke is thinking beyond the virtual classroom. In addition to her work on grants from The University of Texas System and other healthcare organizations, she plans to create a virtual baby, which is difficult because of the current technology used to capture motion. A researcher cannot, for instance, direct an infant to raise its right arm so that the cameras and computers can capture every nuance of the movement as a basis for animation.

“We like to take on complex projects that no one really knows how to do,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in being able to represent humans virtually, both physically and cognitively. Representing non-verbal communication is especially challenging.  This line of research has the potential to make a major difference in the way online medical education and medical simulations are done today.”

Graduate student Michael Lynch investigated the environmental effects of the bottled water business. His project featured an iPhone application that would track where water bottles could be refilled to cut down on plastic waste.

What if many of the touch points along a product’s journey from concept to creation were friendlier to the environment? What if the marketing mechanisms designed to encourage consumption of products were more environmentally conscious?

A graduate course in the School of Arts and Humanities is examining the underlying business issues of an increasingly networked economy, with key explorations delving into design of e-marketing programs, next-generation virtual work interfaces and potential impact of green virtual technologies.

Dr. Marjorie Zielke, assistant professor of arts and technology (ATEC), teaches the E-business Environment Design course. With various guest speakers and readings, such as Jeff Jarvis’ book What Would Google Do?, the class tackled a wide range of topics and discussions.

Students discovered how digital networked technology is restructuring society and changing business and the overall economy. They also explored the impact of e-business design on the environment and analyzed ongoing trends in e-business environment designs.

“The students tackled real business issues in terms of e-marketing, virtual work design and the environment, and they were expected to be able to apply ATEC design ideas in a business context,” said Zielke.

Students implemented class concepts by creating a final project. Michael Lynch, a graduate student in the final year of his MFA in arts and technology degree, investigated the environmental effects of the bottled water business during Zielke’s course. His project featured an iPhone application to track where water bottles could be refilled to cut down on plastic waste.

“We were responsible for finding information for our own individual projects of interest,” said Lynch. “I learned a lot about the e-business environment, including green topics that I had never really considered before, like the recycling and bottled-water industries.”

According to market researcher Mintel, about 12 percent of the U.S. population can be identified as “True Greens,” consumers who seek out and regularly buy so-called green products. Another 68 percent can be classified as “Light Greens,” consumers who sometimes purchase green goods and services.

“The course offered a new perspective on our present business environment, especially at a time when everything we discussed in class was featured in the media,” said Lynch.

Zielke will offer a class on design aspects of e-marketing and e-advertising in Spring 2010.