After months of preparation, the first week of September marked a real milestone: the Build your skills – It’s time to B-prepared course took place with nearly 70 students. Thanks to the persistent work of Zsolt Rézmányi, Professor of Practice at the Budapest University of Economics and Business, and András Majdik, Zoltán Székely and Zsolt Márkus from the B-prepared team, the event was a resounding success. The topic? Preparation for disaster situations for future facility managers.
Room 138 of the Markó Street building was already buzzing with enthusiastic students on Monday, August 31st. (Yes, dear skeptical reader, enthusiastic ones 🙂 ). Why on Earth, as the semester hasn’t even started yet? Not so for the Build your skills – It’s time to B-prepared course, whose first day was dedicated to presenting the B-prepared project and detailing the developed software tools. This alone may not be a reason for enthusiasm, but the main goal of the project is preparation for disaster situations with the help of gamified digital tools. The well-received lectures were followed by Q&A sessions in all cases, with emphasis placed not only on knowledge transfer but also on sensitizing students to the topic and initiating joint brainstorming, which was also aided by group work.
This opportunity provided an ample amount of volunteers to the planned disaster management exercise – with live stream – to also take place here. The exercise was also a scientific one; students were divided into two groups: on the second day, the control group received training on the topic and learned about flood protection during an IM-prepared mobile app guided walk. The other group was immediately thrown into the deep: in the VR-prepared virtual reality serious game, they could individually try what it’s like to find themselves in a flash flood situation, what escape options there are, what the pitfalls are, and they gained first aid knowledge with the help of the augmented reality (AR) section of the IM-prepared mobile app. On the third day, the two groups swapped. The VR session was broadcast live by the VFGE Facebook team, let us express our gratitude also from here!!
What are the takeaways?
The fourth day is dedicated to putting the experiences into practice and deepening the knowledge: in the morning, students can explore various parts of the Disastropedia knowledge hub during a virtual treasure hunt. In the afternoon, they explore and learn to use the RU-prepared knowledge management system: on this platform, besides the classic e-Learning courses containing learning materials, students could find their own scores and results achieved in the games. How did they perform? And are their teachers really better than them? No secrets remain, as the university’s instructors also got the opportunity to try out the tools on this day. The final day, Friday, is dedicated to summarizing and evaluating what was learned.
An intensive week like this is an outstanding example for teaching disaster preparedness to non-professionals. A fun week of gamified training, and these young people will have the right mindset of needing to be prepared for a lifetime.
