News Story

Safety Centre Website launched

Jon Linney, Monday 14 Jan 2002

KMi supports a range of community-based initiatives by seeing how Knowledge Media technologies can be applied locally. The latest of these launched its new site today.

Milton Keynes hosts the UKs very first Safety Centre – a place, known as “Hazard Alley”, which is a purpose-built interactive education centre for children. The centre is the result of collaboration between Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service and Thames Valley Police, and creates a partnership between statutory organisations, local government, health authorities, the private sector and now, the Open University.

Thousands of children visit the centre each year and work on issues like road safety, safety in the home and on the water, etc. When the Safety Centre team came see how new media concepts could help them they knew they needed to appeal to a wide range of users – teachers, children, potential visitors, safety professionals and the general public. What we wanted to do was to show them how their web site should help these users to focus on activities before and then after a centre visit; to help make the visit as effective as possible.

To begin with, we produced some fun, short, interteractive media elements (eg. Flash games) to help focus the kids before the visit; and downloadable paper-based resources (eg. pdf worksheets) to help the teachers, parents and kids to follow-up the visit.