Last December Casper Harteveld defended his impressive PhD thesis at TU Delft, NL, on the design, development and evaluation of the SG Levee Patroller, an operational, 3D serious game for professional and volunteer levee patrollers. In real life levee patrollers inspect levees and report any risks they encounter. Similarly, in the game players have to find all virtual failures in a region and report these. If they do not find the failures in time or report them incorrectly, it could result in a levee breach that floods the whole virtual region.
Using this game an innovative game-based training was set up to prove its effectiveness in training inspection knowledge and skills, and to understand the contributing factors. In total 147 levee patrollers from 3 water authorities in the Netherlands participated in a structured 3-week training which was evaluated using a quasi-experimental design with a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. The results highlight a successful training. Clear evidence was found that the patrollers improved on their inspection knowledge and skills.
Levee Patroller was developed by Deltares together with five water authorities and TU Delft. At this moment, over 1000 people have been trained by Deltares using Levee Patroller in The Netherlands.
The full version of Levee Patroller runs on Windows PC, but a lighter version is available as a free app for Android or iOS platforms.
Casper’s thesis is available at:
http://repository.tudelft.nl/view/ir/uuid:c3d38ad9-88cb-403c-b69e-ba22b005a26f/
More information about the design of Levee Patroller:
The game Levee Patroller: