Effectiveness of serious games for safety training: A mixed method study

Effective safety training is essential to reduce the number of construction accidents caused by unsafe human actions. The application of serious games in construction safety is growing rapidly because serious games offer an interactive and innovative environment for delivering safety training. Thus, evaluating the effectiveness of such safety training tools is indispensable. However, most of the studies that introduce serious game-based safety training use qualitative methods for validation. Therefore, a gap in the literature exists in verifying the effectiveness of serious games by using empirical methods. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of serious games by using various methods such as paper-based assessment and degree of recall. For this purpose, we conducted experiments with a total of 42 senior civil engineering students. According to the mixed ANOVA results, students significantly increased their occupational safety knowledge compared to traditional training after receiving serious game-based safety training. The results also show that serious game-based training provides effective training that ensures the maintenance of safety knowledge acquired over time. Moreover, the game experience levels of the participants did not influence their safety training performance.