Nurse Arcade is a collection of browser-based nursing education games and practice tools. Students can work through medication matching, dosage calculations, lab values, assessment cues, and equipment workflows, while classroom activities give instructors another way to bring practice into a group setting. The idea is to make it easier to return to a concept, try it, get feedback, and try again between classes and lab sessions.

I have spent less than $1,000 building Nurse Arcade up to this point, excluding my own time. That small development budget matters in a field where the cost of learning can limit access. The National Academies’ The Future of Nursing 2020–2030 identifies cost as an important factor in nursing education decisions and emphasizes that students must cover books, supplies, and other educational expenses alongside tuition. Reducing those additional costs is one practical way to support access to nursing education.

There is also evidence that affordable nursing resources are being used at scale. In October 2024, Chippewa Valley Technical College reported that its free Open RN textbooks had reached more than three million users at over 100 institutions worldwide. That uptake demonstrates substantial use of freely accessible nursing materials. Nurse Arcade addresses a related need through interactive practice: students can revisit activities in a compatible browser without purchasing specialized equipment or installing an app. Keeping development costs low creates room to offer affordable practice opportunities, including the planned free Learning Lab membership.

This is also relevant to the Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge’s judging criteria, which ask teams to explain the balance between a solution’s cost and its impact, as well as its practicality and efficient use of resources. A working educational platform built for under $1,000 gives Nurse Arcade a concrete example of resource-efficient development to present. Its potential competitive advantage is the opportunity to extend access to useful practice at low cost. Faculty feedback, learning evidence, and sustainable operating costs will determine how strong that advantage becomes.

Creator Lab is designed to let instructors turn their own course material into games using the formats already in Nurse Arcade. An instructor could choose a game, add questions or select material from a shared content library, review the activity, and share it with students. The goal is to give faculty control over what their students practice without asking them to build a game or write code.

The Learning Lab membership is another part of the platform that is not apparent from simply opening a game. It is designed as a voluntary program for adults who agree to let their use of the educational games contribute to research and improvement. Active participants would receive ongoing free access to eligible Nurse Arcade learning experiences, including after graduation, while the program continues. Enrollment is not yet open.

The planned profile would ask about learner role, program type, stage of education, age range, gender, race and ethnicity, disability or accessibility needs, prior experience, and an optional school name. Profile questions offer a “Prefer not to answer” choice. With separate research consent, a research identifier would connect those responses to limited gameplay records: the game and content version, starts and completions, duration, scores, successes, and failures. Patient information would not be requested and should not be entered.

That information could help investigate which activities people return to, where they stop, and how performance changes with repeated practice. It could also help identify differences in the experience of learners at different stages or with different access needs. These would be questions to study, not conclusions already demonstrated by the platform. A game score does not certify clinical competence, and participation data alone cannot establish that a game caused better learning.

The research design separates the account link from the research records. It keeps research profiles and detailed performance data out of advertising and Google Analytics. Academic exports are currently disabled; the intended later sharing is private, grouped analysis with small groups suppressed. Participants could withdraw to stop new collection and end Learning Lab access. Withdrawal would remove the account link and school name, while earlier records could remain until the retention period ends; the current design removes research records after five years without research activity. This is a description of the planned program, not an invitation to enroll or a claim of institutional research approval.

The web foundation also leaves room for other ways to use the arcade. A native code wrapper such as Capacitor provides a route for adapting web applications into iOS and Android apps, reusing much of the existing work. Packaging selected games that way could support app-store submission after device testing, account integration, and platform-specific work. Store acceptance is a separate review: for example, Apple expects more than a repackaged website. An app release is a possible next format, not something already completed.

Nurse Arcade could also be adapted into a Canvas educational integration. Canvas supports external learning tools through LTI, allowing activities to appear in course modules or assignments. That offers a route toward bringing selected games into the environment faculty and students already use. Secure sign-in, course permissions, and any sharing of results would need to be implemented and agreed with the institution. The games and content provide a starting point; a Canvas integration would still be its own development project.

I am planning toward the University of Washington’s Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge, a student-led competition for products, processes, and services addressing health-related problems. The 2027 application window is listed as December 1, 2026, through noon on January 25, 2027, with the final on February 25. Entry includes a 5–7-page business summary; finalists prepare a one-page summary, a 60-second pitch, and a demonstration.

The relevant area for Nurse Arcade would be Digital Health. Hollomon has a $2,500 Best Idea in Digital Health prize alongside its overall awards. I would enter Nurse Arcade as a digital education platform within the broader competition, with that prize category as the closest fit. Eligibility and judging remain the organizers’ decisions. The published criteria consider the problem, solution, team, customers, demonstration, practicality, and potential impact.

Past finalists provide useful context. PractIV, a 2025 finalist, developed a modular IV training arm for realistic clinical practice. Another finalist that year, ReviveHer, worked on a CPR-manikin attachment intended to improve training and gender equity. Both approached healthcare through opportunities to practice, although their physical training products are different from Nurse Arcade’s browser-based activities.

ShiftSpark won the 2026 Best Idea in Digital Health award for a platform designed to help nurses process stress during a shift. ShiftSpark focuses on helping nurses manage stress at work, while Nurse Arcade focuses on helping students practice what they are learning. These examples show the range of projects presented at Hollomon without suggesting that they establish an outcome for this one.

For faculty exploring Nurse Arcade, the games are available to try, and the work behind them has several directions: maintaining reliable educational content, making practice affordable, studying how learners use it, and making it easier to bring into a course. I would value observations about where an activity fits, what needs correction, and what evidence would make it useful in teaching. Those observations can guide the next stage of development.