PROJECT CANARY

What is PROJECT CANARY?

PROJECT CANARY is an industry first serious games-based simulation training tool developed by the Mining Industry Skills Centre in collaboration with simulation experts, QinetiQ.

The tool places individuals in a virtual world where they are confronted with current workplace scenarios from coal and metalliferous surface mining, as well as underground coal mining.

PROJECT CANARY uses best practice adult learning methodologies to ensure individual users can assess their safety knowledge and learn how to better apply it to solve problems and face challenges working in our resources industry.

What are the benefits?

Aside from the overall benefit of assisting the industry to reach the goal of zero harm, there are a number of benefits associated with using PROJECT CANARY as an extension to existing training and development programs. Specifically, PROJECT CANARY:

• promotes learner accountability for learning and helps assists trainers to make learning more engaging

• creates experiences and provides opportunities for learners to connect new understandings to existing understandings through reflection, thereby increasing their overall understanding and depth of knowledge 

• helps trainers to bring learner behaviour to a conscious level

• is a unique technology that enables users to truly apply the skills of risk assessment while encouraging behavioural change around safe working practices

• provides an environment which is authentic enough for people to behave (in terms of their cognitive/decision making process) as they would in the real world

• depends on trainers to introduce new subject matter for learners, collect answers and make judgments/assessments about competence, therefore adding to the dynamic nature of the training environment

The Future of PROJECT CANARY

PROJECT CANARY will be produced for general use within the industry. It will contain a number of scenarios for dealing with risk, and the library of scenarios will grow over time as the game develops.

The scenario development tool provides a virtually endless capacity to develop scenarios for learning at all levels of training within the resources industry.

The Mining Industry Skills Centre is working with individual mining companies in order to meet their training requirements through the development of this serious game.