Speaker
Speaker Info
- Name
- Afra Çalık Kuş
- Organization
- Suleyman Demirel University / Wefi Games Company
- Country
- Türkiye
- Biography
- Afra ÇALIK KUŞ is an Assistant Professor of Nursing at Süleyman Demirel University and the founder of WEFI Games, a studio dedicated to developing evidence-based serious games for healthcare education. With a dual background in clinical practice and game development, her work focuses on creating authentic, research-driven digital learning tools for nursing students and patients. She earned her PhD with the dissertation “The effect of serious game and standardized patients developed for nursing education on students' level of knowledge, critical thinking, problem-solving skills, satisfaction, and self-confidence in learning,” in which she designed and developed the serious game herself. To support this work, she completed training in Unity game development, coding, and gamification design, and continued her professional growth as an active member of GamFed Türkiye. Her transition from educator to nurse-developer stems from the need to create clinically realistic learning experiences that commercial studios often cannot fully capture. This perspective later evolved into an entrepreneurial path, leading to the establishment of WEFI Games with project-based support. Today, her company develops serious games for both students and patients, integrating pedagogy, clinical insight, and playful design. Afra’s work has been recognized internationally, including the Rosalind Franklin Science Award, and she serves as a Google Women Techmakers Ambassador, supporting women's participation in technology. Her research interests include serious games, game-based learning, XR in healthcare education, and digital health interventions. Through her combined roles as researcher, educator, developer, and entrepreneur, she aims to advance accessible, engaging, and clinically meaningful digital tools for healthcare learning.
- www.linkedin.com/in/afra-calik/
Photo
- Photo
Presentation Info
- Title
- The Insider Advantage: Building Healthcare Games as a Nurse-Developer
- Summary
- Healthcare serious games often lack clinical authenticity because they're designed by technologists, not clinicians. As a registered nurse turned game developer, I embed evidence-based nursing practice directly into game mechanics through my company, WEFI Games. This presentation addresses a critical question: Can serious games designed by clinical insiders produce learning outcomes comparable to traditional methods while offering greater scalability? Through four published studies—including a 2022 Rosalind Franklin Society Award-winning pilot—and a commercial platform now serving 500+ learners across four universities, I demonstrate how clinical expertise transforms serious games from educational novelties into validated training tools. My research validation began with a pilot randomized controlled trial (n=60) examining clinical decision-making, which received the RFS Award in Science from Games for Health Journal (2022). This foundational work showed significant improvements in self-confidence (p<0.05) and two critical subdimensions: using information to determine problems and knowing when to take action. Building on this, a comparative effectiveness study published in Games for Health Journal (2024, n=72) demonstrated my serious game achieved knowledge gains equivalent to standardized patient encounters (p=0.003, Cohen's d=0.727) with identical 10-minute training durations, while significantly increasing student satisfaction (p=0.002). A COVID-19 serious game study in the American Journal of Infection Control (2022, n=62) showed significant knowledge improvement (p0.05 for knowledge retention at 4-week follow-up) with equal time investment. Second, "clinical expertise OR technical skill" misses the point—insider advantage comes from combining both. Games built on nursing educational frameworks produce measurably better engagement than generic designs. The key lesson: healthcare serious games need clinical architects, not just technical implementers. This presentation includes a live demonstration of Campus Atlantis, showcasing AI-integrated diabetic ketoacidosis scenario gameplay. Beyond demonstrating research findings, this talk argues that healthcare educators should build their own serious games rather than outsourcing to external developers. The speaker—a nurse with no prior coding experience—provides a replicable roadmap for clinicians to become game developers, offering evidence that insider knowledge produces superior educational tools. This is both a research presentation and a call to action: if a bedside nurse can build award-winning games, any clinical educator can.
- Keynote
- Presentation
- GFHEU Year
- 2026
Info
- Info