Engaging students in OH&S hazard identification through a game

Abstract

The Construction Industry has one of the highest rates of injury and fatality in Australia and across the world. To address this in Australia, everyone who intends to work on a construction site must complete a Construction Induction course. As Construction Students tend to be experiential learners, class room teaching is often not engaging for them. This paper describes a computer game that was developed as a classroom activity to motivate Construction Induction students to learn about hazards on construction sites and their management via application of OH&S controls. We used a test, a questionnaire and interviews to assess if contextualised game playing improved engagement supported learning and assisted with application to real world situations. Our preliminary results show that the students who played the game were engaged, and felt that through playing the game they increased their knowledge about hazards on construction sites and reinforced the learning of the material presented in the classroom. The data collected to date however does not show strong evidence that game playing made the students statistically better at recognising hazards in pictures depicting real world situations.