Using Serious Games to Train Children and Elicit Fire Safety Behaviour

Abstract

Serious Games are being increasingly used as a tool for various applications, contrary to the traditional entertainment purpose. One of their application domains is fire safety. Possible injuries from fires are a dangerous safety concern for children, for instance. Another important issue is the elicitation of behavioural knowledge to design and feed simulation models. The lack of human behaviour data is often referred to as a drawback to evacuation simulation designers. This paper addresses the aforementioned matters in respect to: i) acquiring valuable knowledge on children behaviour when facing the urgent need for evacuation; and ii) devising an educational tool. A group of 19 children from an elementary school played two different role plays using a Serious Game and the data of their behaviours was collected. Results were analysed and are here presented. Future work is twofold: to expand and to refine data collection to other groups such as elderly; to use this data for crowd synthesis particularly for evacuation simulators.

Model-Driven Serious Game Development Integration of the Gamification Modeling Language GaML with Unity

“…In [17] authors present a prototype of a serious game, whose goal is to instruct people about fire drills. A virtual fire evacuation coach was therefore developed.…”

April 2021

“…Digital resources, activities and social media are cost-effective ways to engage children, disseminate and reiterate fire safety information and implement prevention activities (Morrongiello & Schwebal 2017, Towers & Whybro 2017. New research suggests that serious games and augmented/virtual reality can train older children and adolescents to respond to a fire, make sound decisions and evacuate safely (Almeida & Rossetti 2015, Cakiroglu & Gokoglu 2019. Serious games recreate situations that are difficult to simulate in the real world with a high degree of immersion and realism.…”

Evidence-based practices of effective fire safety education programming for children

“…Digital resources, activities and social media are cost-effective ways to engage children, disseminate and reiterate fire safety information and implement prevention activities (Morrongiello & Schwebal 2017, Towers & Whybro 2017. New research suggests that serious games and augmented/virtual reality can train older children and adolescents to respond to a fire, make sound decisions and evacuate safely (Almeida & Rossetti 2015, Cakiroglu & Gokoglu 2019. Serious games recreate situations that are difficult to simulate in the real world with a high degree of immersion and realism.…”