For the purposes of the development of the STEP_UP game and characters, CIPH is creating a character and scenes in the field of public health. The goal was to identify stakeholders within this sector and bring their expertise and real life experience together through a constructive workshop. During the workshop the character was presented along with potential scenes and feedback was gained through exercises evaluating the character, scenes, impacts on the spread of the disease and the impacts on society. Gaining knowledge and feedback from relevant stakeholders was of great benefit to development of the game.
CIPH character in the STEP_UP game is a public health professional/epidemiologist. Our online workshops were held at the end of July and we chose to hold a group workshop so as to create an atmosphere that would allow for different points of view and ideas to be shared and allow for critical feedback from a variety of experts who have been frontline workers during the pandemic. Aids such as Google Jamboard were used to make the workshop as interactive as possible online. All participants, four in total were employed as physicians at public health institutes both at the national and local level.
All participants were very enthusiastic about participating and contributing to the development of the educational game being developed by the STEP_UP team. Participants were productive with feedback and engaged throughout the duration of the workshop. Many useful insights were gained as well as suggestions for what improvements and could be made to help improve the understanding and level of complexity of the game regarding the public health sector. Points which we were told to keep in mind while finalising our scenes and characters were to keep in mind the dynamics of the pandemic that will greatly influence what measures are in place and what impacts they will have on societies and individuals.