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We have been working with schools and Northumbria University to develop a unique child road safety training scheme, the aim of which is to raise the awareness of stop, look, listen, think, and safer places to cross. We have been doing this through coding. The way that we learn to cross the road, has very close links to how you create a computer program. We have found that after one lesson, children remember the simple steps of what to do before you cross the road, for a longer time than if delivered through a road safety assembly.
We have created the lesson, with the aim that teachers can deliver this themselves in school, as we have limited human resources. We have called it Green Cross Coding. The website is http://www.greencrosscoding.com
We are looking for other local authorities who might be interested in trialling this. If they are, they could reach out to andrew.dow@northumbria.ac.uk, and he will have the links to other people involved in this group.
it’s great to hear about proactive development of training to keep children safe. I judge CIHT’s annual road safety awards and as I work in infrastruture (though I have a BSc in psychology as well.) we always have someone specialised in evaluation of educational initiatives, especially Liz Box of RAC Foundation whose PhD in educational interventions for road safety gave her detailed and current insight into the often counter-intuitive outcomes. through working with Liz and reading about her research as well as my own psychology studies I’ve found that it’s easy to do something that seems to be an improvement but is actually neutral or even adverse. for example recall of a message might be measured as better but that might translate to higher confidence/less caution in a real world environment, meaning there was no actual reduction in risk and potentially an adverse net effect. we know this is common in interventions for older children/teens and in skid-training for adults. Off-road driving training, considered self-evidently good experience can give more confidence (long term effect) but with very short term skills improvement (people dont remember how to distinguish front from rear wheel skid for example) and a resulting increase in subsequent collision involvement. Do you have a local academic specialist in the relevant area of psychology supporting the scheme approach and measurement of outcomes to identify and tweak any factors that might have these unintended adverse outcomes? sometimes they can give a brief overview and suggestions as an uncharged support before sharing with other authorities, or other authorities might have this support and be able to bring that to the programme?
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