Development and effectiveness of a smartphone-based serious game for disaster casualty triage training among nursing...

To develop a smartphone-based serious game to enhance disaster triage competency and evaluate its effectiveness among nursing students.

Disaster triage competency is essential in nursing education, yet opportunities for practice-based training remain limited and evidence supporting serious games for triage education is scarce.

A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design with a nonequivalent control group.

A smartphone-based serious game was developed using the ADDIE model. Participants were 98 second-year nursing students from a single college in D city, South Korea, recruited using convenience sampling. The experimental group (n = 50) used the serious game, while the control group (n = 48) received traditional instructor-led instruction. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, χ² tests and independent t-tests using SPSS/WIN version 21.0.

The experimental group showed significantly higher START triage knowledge (t = -2.45, p = .016, d = 0.50), triage accuracy (t = -3.39, p < .001, d = 0.69), rubric score (t = -2.11, p = .037, d = 0.43) and learning transfer expectations (t = -2.98, p = .004, d = 0.61) than the control group. However, no significant differences were observed in overall triage knowledge (t = -1.23, p = .221) or classification time (t = .20, p = .840).

The smartphone-based serious game significantly improved START knowledge and triage accuracy but not overall knowledge and classification time. These findings suggest that serious games may serve as a scalable and supplementary educational tool in disaster nursing education.