Off by heart: Waikato surgeon turns surgery into child’s play
Tuesday, 21 July 2026
It took David McCormack 16 years to become a heart surgeon, but the Waikato doctor has created a digital game allowing those with far less expertise to try their hand at it.
The game, Heart Heroes, has been welcomed as a fun way to demystify surgery for patients and students internationally.
It’s been an unexpected and heartwarming response for McCormack, who said he launched the game earlier this month to show his two daughters, aged 8 and 10, what his job involved.
“I made this game to try and help them understand the steps of what I do, and just make it fun,” he said.
His own pathway to becoming a heart surgeon involved about 16 years of training, and involved little in the way of games, but he viewed them as a good way to learn.
He used AI tools to turn his medical expertise and ideas into a digital game by describing what he wanted in natural language, rather than laboriously writing code.
“I put that together and then [the girls] really enjoyed it, they shared it with some of their friends, their friends really enjoyed it — I thought, well, let me just share this on LinkedIn.”
He expected it might spark some thought about using AI to develop kids’ creativity, but instead there was a large response from two unexpected demographics.
“I also got a lot of feedback from patients, some of which I'd operated on, some of which are awaiting an operation now.
“They said it was a really good source of empowerment that took away a lot of their anxiety, because it demystified things and allowed them to understand, in very plain terms, the steps of what we're doing.”
The other group it resonated with was medical students, who found it a helpful way to understand the sequence of steps in an operation.
Players could choose between two operations: a coronary artery bypass and an aortic valve replacement. They could also choose between three levels of difficulty, from intern level to the “fast and precise” consultant level.
His daughters also suggested giving players a score out of 1000 so they could compete with each other.
“Then they proceeded to beat me… [a] good build of confidence for them, a good dose of humility for me.”
McCormack, who is involved in AI policy and leads the Healthcare AI initiative at the University of Waikato, was thinking about ways to take the concept further with different operations, and, with a team, was looking into how it could improve medical and surgical education.
Successive generations risked losing resonance with people who were currently learning, he said.
“If I'm able to bridge a generational gap and generate a learning tool that resonates with the current group of people learning, then that's a really positive thing.”
He was also surprised by the international response. There were more than 11,000 impressions on the LinkedIn post, including people in the UK and the USA, Australia, India and South Africa.
“I didn't expect the internationalisation of it. A lot of the students coming back to me are from all over the world.”
The trainee version of the heart surgery game had already been used by UK cardiac surgeon Kamran Baig as part of a surgical training group at the Royal Society of Medicine.
He came across the game via LinkedIn, and told the Waikato Times he found it clear and simple to follow, so he decided to use it with trainees before they practised operating on pig hearts.
“The game has immense potential in the education of medical students and health care professionals in the basics of cardiac surgery. Playing the game is more memorable than simply reading steps in a book or even watching a video on YouTube, for example,” he said.
There was even more greater potential through adding advanced features for unusual conditions and complications, he said.
Among those taking part in Baig’s training session were UK medical students Vlad Roman and Yuvraj Juttla, who said it showed the flow of the operation in a way that was “exactly what students need” before getting hands-on.