A serious game for traffic accident investigators

All new police officers recruited by Dubai Police go through the same training process, which consists of lectures and on-the-job training (designed for their specific rank category). The training is administered by Dubai Police Academy which also accepts recruits from other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Republic of Yemen, and Palestine. The training duration varies from 6 months to 4 years, based on the rank category. After graduation, local recruits are assigned to police stations and departments in which they receive further on-the-job training. The objective of the research presented in this paper is to assess the suitability of a virtual environment for training traffic investigators. In particular, a game-based environment has been used to enhance the performances of the police officers to address some of the problems identified with the current training process in Dubai Police (BinSubaih et al, 2005a). The general problem with training for practical skills is well documented (Aldrich, 2005) (Carless, 2005). Using only lectures lacks interaction and engagement. Additionally, in the training courses, we observed that the time allocated for a course was not sufficient to cover all the various accident types. The participants in this study complained of Interactive Technology & Smart Education (2006) 4: 329–346 © 2006 Troubador Publishing Ltd.