Computers in Physical Therapy Education: Interactive Multimedia Learning with MuStreT

Muscular strength tests are of fundamental importance for the physiotherapeutic diag- nosis and a difficult issue for learning. Also, there are very few softwares specifically developed for teaching/learning and diagnosis in the Physical Therapy area. This work describes the devel- opment and evaluation of MuStreT, an educational multimedia computer tool for Physical Ther- apy students. MuStreT integrates hypertext, movie clips, narrations, animations, self-evaluation questionnaires, and was inspired by the constructivism concepts. The software was developed us- ing Unified Modeling Language concepts and implemented using animation and authoring tools. MuStreT was quantitatively evaluated by Physical Therapy students and qualitatively evaluated by Physical Therapy professionals/lecturers and Computer Science students. Results show that learn- ing was increased using MuStreT, thanks to its interactivity potential and multimedia features. This work suggests that the use of informatics in Physical Therapy education has a great potential for improving the teaching-learning process.

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