Abstract
Welding is one of the most fundamental and necessary work in the industry that demand sophistication of skilled workers. This study is to introduce welding simulator as a training tool, to verify its effectiveness and to measure satisfaction of the trainees. A group of freshman students at a Korea Polytechnics College in their twenties with less experience of welding participated in the study. They were divided into two groups and took a traditional training course (comparison group) and a training course with welding simulator applied reality/haptic technology (experimental group) for same hours respectively. To evaluate training effect, a national certificate test and a survey based on Phillips' ROI (Return on Investment) methodology were conducted by the students and the college respectively. And satisfaction survey among the students based on Kirkpatrick's Four-Level Evaluation Model was also carried out. The results showed that all students in the experimental group passed the national certificate test and the ROI of the experimental group for five years were 110% higher than the comparison group. Furthermore, 25% more students in the experimental group replied "very satisfied" about the overall training course and 75% more students in the same group found that the simulation was very similar to the real welding.