Abstract:

Safe education environment is one of the most important contents in school systems. Unfortunately, there are some school environments that set bigger challenges for the safety than normal school environments. Especially in vocational schools, there are many machines that pose challenges for the safety of students. For example, the using of table saws or tuning machines can be a challenging task for novice users. Therefore, it is important to guarantee that students can use these machines in a safe way. The most important tool for achieving this goal is to give a special instruction session to whole student group by the teacher. But later, there can also be a need for personal instructions. For example, a student may want to recall the safety matters related to the particular machine. The best way to do this personal guidance is to do it by the teacher. However, sometimes a student has to do this recall by its own. This is usually done by examining the safety manual of the machine. However, the young people are accustomed to the digital world and information. They are not necessary so enthusiastic to use traditional paper-based instruction manuals. So, there is a need for new kinds of digital guiding tools.

In this study, we have demonstrated this kind of digital tool by using the video-based implementation. We set two main targets for the implementation. The system has to be cheap enough to implement and very easy to use. These targets were achieved by using Web and Near Field Communication (NFC) to implement this video-based instruction system. NFC-technology lets NFC-capable smartphones and tablets communicate with NFC tags. A NFC tag can reside, for example, on the surface of a technical device, and this tag can contain information about the device. In our study, the NFC tag includes information about the Internet location of the particular instruction video so that this video can automatically be opened on the screen of the user device. NFC is a form of contactless radio communication. This contactless communication allows a user to wave his or hers smartphone over a NFC tag to get information without needing to touch the tag or go through multiple steps to setting up a connection. NFC tags don't require batteries. They get their power from just being near a powered NFC device, for example a smartphone. Nowadays, many smartphones and tablets are NFC capable. NFC tags are also inexpensive.

We demonstrated our solution in the school of WinNova which is a vocational school in Finland. The machine used in this demonstration was a table saw. Our solution worked properly and we were encouraged by the positive feedback of the students.