UK researchers develop video game to teach agricultural safety to college and high-school students

Screen shot of “Hazard Ridge” video game

Researchers at the University of Kentucky are using a video game to educate young people about the dangers of agriculture, a line of work that has one of the highest rates of workplace fatalities in the U.S., Olivia McCoy reports for UKnow.

Since 2013 researchers at the UK College of Education and the Southeast Center for Agricultural Health and Injury Prevention, in UK’s College of Public Health, have been teaching agriculture students and high-school students ag safety using a 3-D game called Hazard Ridge, which “simulates an injury that has occurred in a small rural town where teens are disappearing and the town is going bankrupt,” McCoy writes.

“Players serve as the investigator of this issue and learn how agricultural injuries have negative effects on the town’s economy and citizens,” McCoy writes. “The game teaches investigative skills and educates on how to conduct a financial analysis of injury.”

Jennifer Watson, research coordinator for the Southeast Center for Agricultural Health and Injury Prevention, “said one of the goals for the game is to ‘overcome the culture of comfort’,” McCoy writes. Watson told McCoy, “Spending their entire lives around dangerous equipment lulls those working and living on farms into a false sense of safety and lessens their belief that they are at risk for injury.” She said preventive measures, such as the game, reduces the risk of injury or death. (Read more)