WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — For school counselors, the first time helping a suicidal student can be an emotional trial by fire. To better prepare counselors for this type of charged situation, a Purdue University professor has developed a computer simulation for virtual training.

These screen captures show parts of the Suicide Risk-Assessment Game, which is designed to help train students who might one day work with young people in need of counseling. The virtual training tool was developed by Carrie Wachter Morris, a Purdue assistant professor of counseling and development. (Images provided by Carrie Wachter Morris)

Carrie Wachter Morris is an assistant professor of counseling and development in Purdue’s Department of Educational Studies and a former counselor at facilities throughout North Carolina. She developed the Suicide Risk-Assessment Game, or SRAG, with the aid of a digital-content development grant from Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), Purdue’s central information technology organization.

Of 34 grant applications submitted in 2008, Wachter Morris’ was one of 10 accepted, earning $15,000 and the use of ITaP resources toward developing the training tool.

SRAG’s concept and content is hers, but a team of student developers led by Terry Patterson, an educational technologist with ITaP’s emerging technologies group, oversaw the graphic design and programming.

“It wasn’t only the social impact on a very serious issue that appealed to the grant committee about the idea,” Patterson said. “This was a great opportunity for students to create a framework for a serious game that could be reused for other experience simulations.”

Wachter Morris intends SRAG to be “an emotional equalizer” that benefits school-counseling students at Purdue and also addresses the gap between counselor training and professional expectations.

“The more we’re worried about ourselves, the more we focus on us and not the clients,” she said.

Statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that in 2007 14.5 percent of high school students seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months, while 6.9 percent reported making at least one suicide attempt. A 2002 Brigham Young University survey of school counselors found 35 percent of respondents received no graduate-education training in crisis intervention, and 57 percent felt either “not at all” or “minimally” prepared for such intervention.

“As a field, we have to generate teaching tools that those without the background can effectively use,” Wachter Morris said. “Studies show that students we’re matriculating have spent more time during school playing video games than reading. Now that these students are entering graduate school, why not develop a tool from which they can learn in a medium with which they’re familiar?”

In gamer parlance, SRAG is a beat-the-clock title: A note has been found from a student planning to commit suicide Friday after school. Players have 40 in-game hours (30- 45 minutes in real time) to assess which one of five students is at imminent risk of suicide and which one is a false risk – meaning there might be danger signs to monitor in the future, but no worry of immediate harmful action.

SRAG’s scoring system requires players to forge a path to assessment rather than asking students outright if they’re suicidal. Their investigation is complicated by daily tasks generally required of school counselors in the real world, ranging from lunch duty to small-group counseling. Failing to address these tasks will result in a time-consuming penalty.

Should a player not correctly identify the imminently suicidal student before the clock runs out, SRAG offers a “deus ex machina” – or “out of the blue” – element to save the student.

Wachter Morris envisions SRAG one day helping to train resident advisers in college residence halls, other mental-health professionals and, perhaps, middle- and high-school students to recognize risk behaviors.

In December, Wachter Morris introduced SRAG to nine graduate students in her school-counseling seminar – most of whom have had counseling internships and practical experience. Although some suggested efforts to improve SRAG, the students generally appreciated its accuracy and the interface. She will soon run her training program through focus groups at Purdue and in the spring will send it to campuses around the country with school-counselor programs to receive feedback from instructors and students.

“SRAG is that half-step between in-class instruction and a student in front of you where it’s in the moment and you have to think on your feet,” Wachter Morris said.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — When Tara Holt, a third-year Purdue University pharmacy student from Frankton, Ind., steps into a pharmacy clean room for the first time, she’s likely to experience a little déjà vu.

The room should look and sound familiar. Nothing ought to feel strange about standing encased in a sterile hair cover, mask, gown, gloves and booties. That’s because Holt and her classmates will have experienced it all before—in a virtual version of a pharmacy clean room. The computer-generated, 3-D immersive environment created in a Purdue project brings to mind the holodeck on the Starship Enterprise, for a serious purpose rather than recreation.

Purdue students don masks in preparation for working in a sterile environment. Concern over the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens has only increased the need for expertise in pharmacy clean-room procedures.

“For those of us who have never worked in a hospital with a clean room, it gave us a first-hand feel of what we can expect when we are on rotations,” Holt said. “The detail that was put into this project really helped make it as close to reality as possible.”

Pharmacy clean rooms are sterile environments where pharmacists and pharmacy technicians prepare materials that need to be guaranteed contamination-free, said Steve Abel, assistant dean for clinical programs in the Purdue School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Generally found in hospitals and home health care companies, the rooms are used to prepare drugs, intravenous drips, syringes, chemotherapy treatments and the like, especially those administered directly into the bloodstream—a factor that makes vital the use of a clean room and proper clean-room procedures. Concern over the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens has only increased the need for such expertise.

The number of clean rooms where pharmacy students can train is limited, however. When the training involves real materials, it also can be expensive, sometimes prohibitively so. Abel said Purdue pharmacy students tend to get limited training time at the end of their third year, just before they serve a practicum that could land them in a clean room.

The situation got Abel thinking when he toured Purdue’s Envision Center for Data Perceptualization. The center is part of Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), the university’s central information technology organization, and ITaP’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. It uses cutting-edge techniques, virtual environments among them, to explore new methods for research and education.

Astronauts and pilots train in flight simulators, Abel reasoned, so why not pharmacy students? He collaborated with Envision Center Managing Director Steve Dunlop, who enlisted Purdue Computer Graphics Technology Department students Chris Mankey of Fishers, Ind., Chris Sprunger of Lafayette, Ind., and Evan Underwood of Kokomo, Ind.

“To our knowledge, this is the only virtual clean room,” Dunlop said. A Purdue Provost’s instructional grant, as well as funding from Purdue’s Pharmacy School, paid development costs.

The simulator runs in a multiwall immersive environment at the Envision Center and will work on wall-sized panels and portable display systems, too. The equipment employs 3-D glasses and a wireless controller something like a Nintendo Wii’s to put users in the middle of the virtual world being projected and allow them to navigate and manipulate it. Head-tracking capability adjusts the view as a user looks around, or “walks” through, the environment, which is detailed down to the labels on the medicine bottles. The software also has been modified to run on desktop and laptop computers.

The virtual clean room was created from hundreds of digital pictures taken at Clarian Health Partners and Wishard Health Services in Indianapolis, in facilities compliant with USP 797, the federal regulation governing pharmacy clean rooms. The computer-graphics technology students also captured ambient sound and included it in the simulator.

The result stunned Jill Tyner when students began working in the virtual environment during the first semester of 2009. Her reaction wasn’t atypical.

“The technology that made this possible is unbelievable,” said Tyner, a Purdue pharmacy student from Kansas City, Mo. “After this experience, I would feel comfortable stepping into a clean room and explaining the different areas.”

The virtual clean room isn’t perfect—and that’s by design. Abel asked Carrie Jacobs, a sixth-year pharmacy doctoral student from Kalamazoo, Mich., Sheetal Patel, a Purdue pharmacy fellow from Philadelphia, and Ashley Vincent, a pharmacy resident from Indianapolis, to test the simulator before bringing in students and to prepare a lab curriculum for use with the facility. Version one, they decided, was a bit too clean. “It needs to be messier,” Vincent observed.

The Envision Center team added a pop can to a refrigerator for medicines, some empty cardboard boxes along a wall, improperly stored syringes, misplaced medicine bottles and other clean room no-nos. Abel said the idea is to help teach proper clean-room procedures by having students identify improper items included in the virtual environment.

“It helped us learn the regulations and what not to do in a clean room,” said Caryn Davis, a pharmacy student from Valparaiso, Ind. Likewise, Lindsey Corbets said the virtual clean room let her practice what she’s been taught and explore how a clean room is set up. But she sees possibilities beyond that.

“I think virtual reality technology is going to become a very big part of teaching,” said Corbets, a student from Rochester Hills, Mich. “It can be used in many different types of classes, from simulating clean rooms all the way to showing what the inside of a body could look like.”

The Envision Center is exploring several other immersive virtual training projects for health care and for geriatric care purposes, as well as for first responders and emergency personnel and construction managers.