VR-MED : linguagem de domínio específico para desenvolvimento de ambientes virtuais aplicados ao ensino de medicina de família e comunidade

Abstract

Besides the entertainment a game can offer, it can also be applied in the training of professionals or as an aiding tool for student s learning. This type of game is known as Serious Games. In the Educational area, this kind of tool is part of what is known as Educational Objects. Nowadays the increase in the quantity of available Educational Objects has become notable. Some in fact are even incorporating Virtual Reality resources. The development of this kind of application demands a considerable computational effort due to the specification of involved areas (games, education, and virtual reality). Furthermore, the lack of normative devices, the absence of standardization as much for the interface elements as technical interaction, makes the construction of these applications to be carried out without the possibility to reuse the already existing artifacts. This causes new applications to redo what could have been reutilized. Within Software Engineering, the Software Reuse area seeks ways to promote the reutilization of software artifacts in order to increase productivity, improve the trust in the quality of the applications, and diminish the costs of the development process. This area attempts to identify, organize and gather functionalities that are similar to the same application domain in order to compose a collection of applications with a specific set of characteristics. One of the tools to take advantage of this common set of characteristics, the Domain-Specific Language, tends to solve particular problems in the modeled domain such as the creation and documentation of rules and important matters of the domain as its principal advantages. Heading off to the VR-MED, described here in this work, the objective is to permit the development of virtual environments in a computer game mode applied to teaching in the Family Medicine domain. Based on a high level of abstraction visual notation and its ease in use, from both programmers and professionals in the health department, the VR-MED allows the creation of executable virtual environments (games) starting from textual medical cases normally used in practice in medicine school.