A Serious Game For Occupational Health And Safety Training in a Construction Site
A Serious Game For Occupational Health And Safety Training in a Construction Site
A Serious Game For Occupational Health And Safety Training in a Construction Site
Seda Çellek, Kaan Erarslan, Mehmet Özdemir
Abstract
"The basic conceptual approach of occupational health and safety (OHS) is to prevent accidents and hazardous events before they occur (Bastos et al., 2013). Cognitive and qualified training of the workers in a workplace is a crucial trivet serving this purpose (Palka, 2017). In many countries, work law and legislation oblige OHS training before and during the life of workplaces regarding İLO standards (Alli, 2008; Legislation, 2022). A well-trained staff means workers equipped with the necessary knowledge, behavioral culture, and reflexes. Otherwise, training may not be stated as satisfactory. Recent visual technologies are evolving rapidly and are utilized in different disciplines such as healthcare, industrial branches, advertising, education, etc. (Blumberg et al., 2013). OHS training is one of the fields in which new technologies, approaches, materials, and digital transformation can find comprehensive and various applications. The computer game sector is an active industrial field due to increasing employment capacity and huge economic volume. On the other hand, games and gamification are also helpful, motivating, and powerful educational tools when pedagogically well designed and properly used (Caponetto et al., 2014). Gamification can be described as developing a digital game environment and scenario for a severe case/non-entertainment case to increase the motivation and interest of the user on that issue (Educause, 2011). Morschheuser et al. (2018) state that since the 2010s, gamification has become one of the leading technologies and software. Hybridization and cooperation of classical education methods and new technological approaches may give better results after scientific research and pedagogical design (Bai et al., 2020). Connolly et al. (2012) state that playing computer games is related to perceptual, cognitive, behavioral, affective, and motivational impacts and outcomes. The knowledge acquisition/content understanding and affective and motivational outcomes seem the most frequent results and impacts. Various researches have revealed the effect and power of games for a better understanding, enhanced level of consciousness, and joyful training process (Gee, 2005; Erarslan, 2005). Another issue is its positive effect on students’ engagement are studied by Seixas et al. (2016) The positive impact of gamification on academic performance and social behaviors has also been determined (Díaz-Ramírez, J., 2020). Krath et al. (2021) explained how gamification supports positive affect and motivation, behavior change, and learning, and the need to study the current theoretical understanding of the psychological mechanisms of gamification. The authors also clarify the issue of gamification, game-based education, and serious game terms. The construction industry also has an application field of game-based training for OHS training. A serious game is considered a promising tool to engage learners and enhance their retention of important concepts (Greuter et al., 2012). It has been shown that a serious game can be a suitable manner for training in the construction industry (Din and Gibson, 2019; Mohd et al., 2019). Besides scientific studies, commercial applications can also be found in the market (Alhadeff, 2014; Construction Simulator, 2022). In this work, a first-person role-playing game (FP-RPG) type serious game is developed to be applied in occupational health and safety training and testing. The case study was developed for a construction site as the construction industry is one of the most dangerous industrial branches (EUStat, 2020) and the level of involvement in the accidents arising from workers or the work team is fairly remarkable (Haslam et al., 2005). The three- dimensional model of a skyscraper under construction is used as the training and testing environment. After the scene organization in the Unity 3D game engine, the code scripts required to realize the scenario was written in the C# programming language. This descriptive paper presents the theoretical perspective, methodology, program codes, functions, and application stages."
Reference
Çellek, S., Erarslan, K., & Özdemir, M. (2023). A serious game for occupational health and safety training in a construction site. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377146660_A_Serious_Game_For_Occupational_Health_And_Safety_Training_in_a_Construction_Site
Keywords
Occupational Health and Safety (OHS), Gamification, Serious Games