Design and Development of a Component-Based System for Virtual Patients in the Virtual World of Second Life

This paper presents the development of a Component-Based System structured as a distributed three-tier architecture, enabling monitoring and information visualisation of application activity as well as presentation of feedback to learners via a Heads-Up-Display (HUD) in the virtual world of Second Life . The activities follow a game-based learning approach and take place in a Respiratory Ward in Second Life , where learners interact with virtual patients receiving intrinsic feedback about their diagnosis, investigations and treatments. The proposed architecture developed by the authors, consists of different virtual patient components that provide the relevant personal and clinical data to the clinical scenario; a data availability model that enables the sequencing and progressive disclosure of a virtual patient identifying triggers and scaffolding information, and an activity model which encodes the activities available and how the learner will be able to engage with the virtual patients.