Hot Wheels Unplugged: Driving Training for Emergency Medical Technician students

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Session Description

Training emergency medical technician (EMT) students to drive an emergency ambulance is an extremely resource intensive and logistically challenging task. Factors such as functioning ambulances, securing open practice space, set up of courses with traffic cones, and scheduling logistics need to be coordinated. Computer science (CS) educators have successfully used unplugged activities that do not require the use of any specific digital devices or computer hardware to teach computer science skills especially in schools that do not have proper technology resources, Internet connectivity or even electrical power. Following the unplugged CS approach, toy cars by the brand name of “Hot Wheels” were used by the EMT students to practice driving each course objective. Course objective maps, created using Google Draw and printed on regular paper and laminated, were used as replicas of actual closed driving courses. The “Hot Wheels Unplugged" is designed to provide a low-fidelity, low-resource simulation where students could repeatedly practice on their own kinesthetic skills of “driving” an ambulance before it was their turn to drive real ambulances on the closed course. Students were asked to work in groups of two, to observe each other and provide feedback on performance. An online evaluation survey was completed by trainees. This presentation will provide an overview of this unplugged activity as well as the results of the evaluation survey.

 

 

Presenter(s)

Judy Kakazu
Honolulu Emergency Medical Services

Judy Kakazu holds a MEd in Learning Design and Technology. She has been a paramedic with the City and County of Honolulu Emergency Medical Services for more than 30 years and is currently helping to develop their training section as a training supervisor.

Peter Leong
University of Hawaii-Manoa

Dr. Peter Leong is an Associate Professor with the Department of Learning Design & Technology, University of Hawaii-Manoa. He has extensive experience in the development and delivery of online courses and distance education. Dr. Leong was honored as one of Hawaii’s 2007 top high-technology leaders and was recognized with the University of Hawaii Board of Regents’ Medal for Teaching Excellence award in 2012. Dr. Leong was the developer of the College of Education’s island in Second Life and he organized the first virtual graduation at UHM, which allowed LTEC students both on Oahu and off-island to experience a virtual graduation ceremony in spring 2010. He was a co-investigator on a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to evaluate new approaches to improving engagement, diversity, and retention in undergraduate computer science and currently serves as a co-investigator of a Computer Science for All NSF grant focused on culturally-relevant computing . His research interests include culturally-relevant computing, student satisfaction with online learning, faculty support for technology integration, technologies for distance education and teaching & learning in virtual worlds.

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