GIOCA
The agricultural sector remains one of the most affected by workplace accidents. Several factors, including its non-standardized, fragmented structure, the seasonal nature of the work, and the linguistic barriers in the sector, complicate the organization, dissemination, and evaluation of effective safety training programs.
The GIOCA project proposes a serious game to promote and reinforce work-safety principles. Serious games use playful mechanics to support learning processes and encourage behavioral change in real-world, serious contexts. This gamified solution can complement existing training tools and can be easily distributed, providing workers a safe yet practical environment in which to experiment.
The aim of the project is to design and develop a serious game that can effectively address workers’ unsafe behaviors by creating realistic scenarios while engaging workers through a fun and challenging experience. The game will be easy to use for an audience with diverse ages and technological skills, as it will be deployed on the smartphone, a familiar device already owned by most workers. Since the game will be played without supervision, it is important to provide workers with an interface that is intuitive even for people unfamiliar with games, and that does not require learning a new operational grammar, as would be the case with unfamiliar devices such as Virtual Reality.
The project starts by identifying the risk scenarios the game should address. This will be followed by a design phase, during which agricultural workers and safety trainers will be actively involved in a co-design process. Collaboration with workers will be crucial to developing a game experience that effectively translates acquired safety knowledge and behaviors from the game context into the real work environment, while also taking into account workers’ prior positive and negative experiences with other educational programs. The usability of the developed game will be tested with agricultural workers through field tests involving tractor operations, and the most appropriate metrics to evaluate the game’s effects in real-world work contexts will be identified. The expected outcomes aim to promote a safer, more sustainable agricultural sector, ultimately supporting healthier, more resilient working lives.
GIOCA is a collaborative project that involves Gamification Lab La Sapienza, the Department of Psychology of Roma Tre, DAFNE UniTus, CNRSTEMS, and INAIL
PROGETTO GIOCA - BANDO BRIC ID.59
Participants:
PI - Emanuele Panizzi
La Sapienza: Emanuele Panizzi, Francesco Lutrario, Elena Valsecchi, Venkata Srikanth Varma Datla
Roma Tre: Federica Caffaro, Giulia De Paolis
UniTus: Leonardo Bianchini, Valeria Maria Di Cesare, Pierluigi Rossi, Massimo Cecchini
CNR STEMS: Niccolò Pampuro, Danilo Rabino, Davide Allochis, Christian Preti
Responsabile INAIL: Carla Simeoni