Teach our kids to drive better

The simulator is a very suitable teaching method for driver training. Car driving involves a large number of behaviour- and traffic rules, but in addition it requires a number of ‘psychomotor’ skills. Examples of these are steering, estimating and controlling your own speed and that of others, gear shifting, etc. Typically during a normal car drive, a number of these skills are required, while at the same time relevant situations must be recognized (road signs, road types, other traffic) and related to traffic rules. For an inexperienced (novice) driver this can be very demanding. Because of the high task demands, learning progresses slowly. In a simulator, the required skills can be learned one at a time resulting in faster automatization of skills. When skills become automatic, controlled processing requiring controlled attention is typically lower, and different tasks can be done simultaneously. When skills are more automatized, more tasks can be performed simultaneously (such as steering, scanning, applying the traffic rules, and gear shifting), and the quality of driving increases. Especially for this reason, the simulator can be an excellent aid during driver training. However, the quality of the didactics and the software is the determining factor here. In the Load Reduction Method of ST Software, applied in the simulator, this results in a high quality of driver training because:

1. Structured training of separate skills and tasks (such as steering, shifting, scanning, traffic- and behavioural rules) without having to perform complex tasks at the same time (as is the case in driving on public roads).
2. Sound didactics: First training via instruction lessons and then practicing situations in realistic traffic environments, followed by tests.
3. Structured lessons from simple to complex.
4. Direct and consistent feedback on driver errors
5. Clear report after each lesson. During any moment during the simulator training the weak points are clear and the instructor/operator can focus on these.
6. Realistic traffic and well structured traffic environments (roads, signs, traffic and environment) during the lessons, which facilitates fast recognition of relevant traffic situations and automatization of skills.
7. The autonomous ‘intelligent’ traffic (with their own perception, decision making and actions) allows a high traffic density in which all traffic interacts in a realistic way. Because of this, the level of realism of this simulator is very high and the step to the real traffic participation on public roads is only small. The transfer of training from the simulator to the road is high because of this: that means that what is learned in the simulator is applied immediately on the public roads. A high transfer of training is a requirement for a high training value. 
8. Because there are a lot of learning situations each lesson, driving experience increases faster on these aspects compared to driving on the road. For example, in the lesson on the highway (P-Highway), which lasts 17 minutes in total, the trainee enters and leaves the highway 6 times. In the lesson of 17 minutes in a town (P-Town) there are a lot of different right-of-way situations in a short period of time. So, a practice lesson in the simulator brings more driving experience compared to a lesson on the road of the same duration.
9. Also, on the road you never know which training situations will be encountered. In the simulator these situations are guaranteed to occur. The trainee drives a fixed route where relevant learning situations are triggered while driving the route.