Designing, implementing and evaluating childbirth training protocol for undergraduate midwifery students with a computer and mobile application based on gamification method: study protocol.

Background: Clinical education plays a very important role in creating the necessary abilities and skills in the students of medical sciences. Any problem in clinical education complicates the patient safety and quality of health care delivery. In this regard, "continuous evaluation", "educational innovation", and "participatory learning" will contribute to more efficiency, and all the mentioned items can be implemented in gamification. The present study is to design, implement, and evaluate a childbirth protocol training application based on gamification in midwifery students.

Methods: This educational scholarship study will focus on all midwifery students entering Babol University of Medical Sciences in 2020 and 2021 during the second semester of the 2023-2024 academic year. The educational intervention will cover six childbirth protocol topics presented through gamification to two groups of midwifery students. Students will complete a demographic and Sibria Sherring's emotional intelligence questionnaire before the intervention, the childbirth protocol knowledge questionnaire and performance checklist at the mother's bedside before and four weeks after the intervention, and the training method satisfaction questionnaire four months' post-intervention. Data will be analyzed using SPSS 28 software with a significance level of less than 5%.

Results: This study will involve preparing, teaching, and evaluating six childbirth protocol topics through a game. It is assumed that the findings indicate that the educational method of gamification is better than the lecture method and by increasing the learning rate, the teaching process will be improved and the students will be fully satisfied with the teaching method.

Discussion: The effectiveness of the gamification method has been reported in various studies in the education of nurses, cardiopulmonary neurology for students, and health professions for medical students. Therefore, this approach can be effective in the delivery of protocol education for midwifery students. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Smart University of Medical Sciences (IR.SMUMS.REC.1402.029) and the study protocol was registered in the Iran Clinical Trial Registry (IRCT20180218038783N7).