OLab (OpenLabyrinth) is an open-source web-based education research platform that supports the creation and publication of virtual scenarios. Much of the earlier focus of Olab was on Virtual Patient (VP) cases – online representations of realistic clinical cases – that play an essential role in medical education. Designed to replicate clinical scenarios, they allow for the safe and risk-free training of medical students in cognitive thinking, clinical reasoning, and skills-based action that are critical in real-life patient care and would be dangerous to practice during a real-life emergency. Our client, a University of Calgary professor, came to us with the idea of modernizing the OLab online activity modeling system that allows users to build interactive game-informed educational activities such as virtual patients, simulations, games, mazes, and algorithms. A new system version, OLab Version 4, was expected to help create highly challenging and interactive virtual scenarios to offer a more engaging and immersive learning experience. One of the main objectives was to retain basic useful functions of the popular concept mapping tool that was first introduced in OLab3, while also making the user interface for scenario development simpler and more accessible.
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