Traditionally, road safety in Ireland was taught by instructors making school visits and through public awareness campaigns in traditional channels. However, as road deaths among Irish children began to rise for the first time in a decade, the Road Safety Authority realised that this approach was no longer cutting it.

Educators had discovered that today’s children learn better by doing, and often via play. This gave us our brief; how can we help children learn via participation with the real-world dangers on Irish roads without actually exposing them to real-world danger?

Our objective was to apply the proven participatory mode of education to the issue of road safety. In doing so, we aimed to create a more direct and effective approach to educate school children, drive better road safety behaviours and move the RSA closer to their ultimate goal of zero deaths on Irish roads by 2050.

The Road Safety-Verse is a virtual world that keeps children safe in the real world. It takes children out of the classroom and immerses them in an interactive educational metaverse, in which they can learn about road safety more effectively and safely.

Cast as avatars, students explore the world in their own time, completing tasks and receiving gamified rewards. Research shows this approach creates a dopamine response, leading to an experience that’s more fun, memorable and therefore more effective than traditional classroom learning.

It features ten interactive environments, each tailored to teach specific road safety behaviours; including safe crossing, parking, pedestrian safety, speeding and speed limits, cycle safety, seatbelt use, drink and drug driving, mobile phone use and fatigue.

Available to schools nationwide, the Road Safety-Verse has turned a passive and resource-intensive means of education into an active and scalable one.

Our strategic approach was found in how our target audience spend their leisure time.

The metaverse might be ad land’s latest bandwagon, but Irish children have been quietly immersed in virtual worlds for more than a decade. This audience have been online since birth, developing an intuitive understanding of complex and interactive digital environments via games such as Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite. These sprawling digital worlds are where they play, how they socialise and how they learn. Their cognitive default is to expect participative learning. And this, therefore, gave us an opportunity to use this behaviour to the Road Safety Authority’s advantage.

Working with academic experts from University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin, we designed an educational metaverse based on contemporary education’s best participative learning practises, that would present the potentially daunting world of road safety within a familiar and appealing context.

The Safety-Verse is a secure online space where RSA educators lead pupils through a fully immersive 360 VR interactive world, featuring directional audio. It is accessed via a website and is compatible with multiple platforms including desktop browser, tablet, mobile and VR headsets; meaning it is accessible, no matter the location of the school or its resources.

Created with Mozilla Hubs using open source technology for future cross-platform integration; the RSA can expand the world over time to include new behaviours, new experiences and new audiences.

Development began in August 2020, followed by design, 3D building, quality testing, and approval in December 2020. Expansion of the world took place until June 2021, followed by penetration and security testing until December 2021. Teacher training and department of education consultation began in January 2022. Pilot tests ran from July to August, before a national launch in September 2022 to schools across Ireland.

Launching in September 2022, it received broad coverage from all Irish national broadcasters and newspapers. Since then, the platform has been adopted into the Irish National School Curriculum, giving access to nearly 1 million students from a total national population of 4.9 million.

This virtual world will not just change how students learn about road safety, but will create a whole new generation of road safety advocates. This makes the Road Safety-Verse a key tool in the Road Safety Authority’s mission achieve zero deaths on Irish roads by 2050.

And that’s just the start. Educators across Europe are also discovering that children today learn best by doing. And so, the Road Safety-Verse was purpose-built with open source technology, meaning that it can be shared with and adapted by other educators across Europe.

This virtual world is set to deliver real-world, life-saving benefits in save lives in Ireland, and beyond.