School Field Trips and Children’s Safety: A Teacher Assistant System for School Field Trips

Abstract

Worldwide school field trips have been an important part of the educational curriculum for young and older students. They are ideally a reinforcement and an extension of the taught curriculum and give the students a more direct, real-world, experience for the theoretical lessons. But for all their benefits, there is also a huge amount of work and stress for the teachers, parents, and school involved [3]. The trade off between prioritizing safety of the students and the quality of school field trips and the incapability of the current communication devices to enhance security of the children during field trips, led us to the idea of a practical safety- orientated communication system between teachers and students during the field trips and particularly in the critical situations. According to the process of the user-centered design method [18], several methods were conducted to specify the requirements and expectations of the teachers from an assistant system. Because of the sensitivity of the children’s related data, the GDPR guideline [7] has been taken into consideration and to assure the usability of the system a three-level iterative design and evaluation process has been applied. The iterative process included a scenario-based design [21] followed by a parallel design and H-form evaluation [9] and a participatory design (PD) workshop [16] combined with a feedback and discussion session, which led to the final design of the system. “SafeTrip” assists teachers to have better control on the students without restricting their free movements. It also reduces the risks of putting children in danger and anxiety of the teacher by decreasing the amount of the preparation needed.