Socially and Playfully Engaged Learning of Emergency Response Training

This project comprises various activities aimed at identifying, formulating, applying, and evaluating design guidelines with the aim of creating more generic and reusable design knowledge for emergency response training programs.
In parallel to the professional SMEs working together on producing a solution, researchers and students worked in an explorative design research process aimed at identifying design guidelines. Three tracks were part of this project: design guidelines, design cycles, and impact evaluation.
1. Design Guidelines. We developed a model to identify and organize social mechanisms to playfully achieve social learning outcomes. We further developed a card deck to support designers in applying such mechanisms in their designs. These concepts were evaluated with professional and aspiring game designers. A conference paper is being prepared to share these insights and collect scientific feedback.
2. Design Cycles. Various groups of students, as well as individual graduates, where involved in exploring different design directions. These students were supervised at the higher education institute but actively involved the SMEs as representatives of the context of application and design knowledge. As such, an exchange of professional and aspiring game designers was facilitated.
3. Impact Evaluation. An impact evaluation of the solution produced by the SMEs was conducted. This involved comparing a baseline evaluation of the current/classic training intervention to an evaluation of the implementation of the new social and playful training. While the baseline evaluation is completed, the impact evaluation is not yet complete due to too little new training sessions and trainers being involved at this point in time. An informal agreement was made to follow-up on this evaluation in the fall.

Every organisation needs to have organised Company Emergency Response (CER) staff. The training of CER must combine knowledge acquisition with knowledge application in performing physical procedures and demonstrating skills. However, current training does not secure well-prepared CER-staff in the long term.
Playful learning is that a more engaging type of training can be created which combines knowledge with skills training. But while social interactions can strongly and positively impact learning as well as motivation, this is not easily facilitated within digital learning environments
Two questions are particularly important for playful learning designers:
• How can playful learning make use of the combination of digital and non-digital working mechanisms to foster learning and motivation?
• How can trainees learn and play together if they are not always present at the same time in within the same learning environment?
The saying at IJsfontein is that individually you can progress, but only together you can persevere. The aim of this collaboration with Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen is to provide playful learning designers with concrete and reusable design guidelines for leveraging social processes in playful learning across the digital/non-digital boundary. As such, we seek to contribute to the practically-oriented design knowledge available to the creative industry through design research that is grounded in practice.
This type of design knowledge can only be fully developed when evaluated across different contexts of application. Therefore, we will form a consortium of partners from the creative industry to write a joint follow-up funding application