Positive Technology Journal

There is an incident at work. One of your fellow colleagues has come to you to ask advice about the way in which a member of your team is making them feel. They believe they are being treated differently from you and the rest of the team because they are from an ethnic minority. It may or may not be racism. The fact is your colleague is feeling

discriminated against. What do you do?

 

This scenario is just one in a series of Bytesize Basics serious games which are designed to allow 'frontline workers' to 'play' with methods of inclusive service delivery away from the frontline. Users are immersed in a virtual safe haven to explore the consequences of their actions in choosing a 'solution' which leads to a video outcome scenario of the likely impact of their choice or decision. Players are also offered counsel support from a virtual tutor expert. Individual or collective users are given the opportunity to play out a numbered of potential scenarios. These are based on their solutions choices to further imbed understanding of likely outcome when seeking to support a colleague in the workplace who confides they are feeling discriminated against.

 

 

The Institute of Digital Learning at the University of Wales, Newport (UK) has been successfully applying serious games positive technologies as a mechanism of empowering workers with virtual experience and knowledge transfer that allows them to deal with situations relating to Equality & Diversity as they arise in a workplace settings.

 

The Challenging Racism in the workplace serious game is one of open source resources developed as part of the Addressing Barriers - Enhancing Services series of Equality and Diversity etraining resources as part of the European Social Fund Welsh Equal Equinex project. Dave Phillips from the South East Wales Racial Equality Council was instrumental in developing the eTraining resource.  Other approaches include the use of virtual tutor expert tutorials, topic resource manuals and MP3 downloads. In addition to Racial Equality training the other Awareness raising topics include Homelessness Awareness, Disability Equality and Age Diversity contextualised for frontline workers in the Welsh/ UK Lifelong Learning sector.  

For further information and to access the serious games and wider etraining as free resources please visit http://equal.newport.ac.uk

 

Matt Chilcott and Nick Savage

Institute of Digital Learning, University of Wales, Newport