Children between the ages of five and 11 can complete exercises in mini VW Beetle cars to gain a driver's licence, at Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany.
The attraction was created by Simtec, with the help of Autostadt and Daywalker-Studio and since its launch in November 2008 has been Autostadt's most popular children's attraction.
The Children's Driving School allows children to negotiate driving situations. Simtec CEO Bernd Kaufmann explains: "We've developed an interactive video control system, which allows kids to influence the driver activities by moving the control wheel or the accelerator pedal. What they do determines the video sequences on the screen, so children feel they're driving the car in the simulation, without having the real task of driving, which is beyond their capabilities and would distract from the idea. The focus is to learn a driver's perspective in traffic."
There are 15 exercises to complete, which test how they'd react in traffic situations. For example, if they approach a junction and remove their foot from the accelerator, the car will stop. If they don't, there's an explanation about their mistake. When there's no traffic, they can put their foot back on the accelerator, turn the steering wheel and carry on with their trip.
Each run lasts five minutes and the results are stored on a chip card, so they can keep going until they complete all 15 tasks and earn their driver's licence. "One major concern was to develop an attraction which is suitable for the age of the kids," added Kaufmann. "As the kids aren't able to interactively drive a car in real city traffic we decided to develop this interactive video concept where they can decide on the mainstream of the video by using the steering wheel and pedals."
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