Abstract:

Videos demonstrating disaster management techniques have been developed in order to help people to cope with disasters. When a disaster strikes, victims have to help each other until a rescue team arrives. In such a situation, it is important that victims who are not severely injured help other victims. However, victims who are not severely injured but have not been trained in survival techniques would be incapable of providing any assistance. People should learn disaster management techniques through such videos in order to cope with disasters. However, for a long time, videos teaching disaster management techniques did not deal with the provision of assistance to victims of a disaster, while considering seriousness and familiarity. In fact, it is difficult to teach disaster management techniques while considering seriousness and familiarity. Videos teaching disaster management techniques have to have appropriate balance of seriousness and familiarity in training.
In this study, influence of videos with seriousness and familiarity on learning disaster management was investigated by experiments. Therefore, a video that had two characteristics was developed to resolve such problems. First, the video contained footage from the documentary Hanshin Awaji Great Earthquake, which struck at 5:46 a.m. on January 17, 1995 in order to have seriousness. Second, the video contained two computer-animated characters —an instructor and a student—in order to increase familiarity and make the video entertaining. Further, the impact of the video on citizens, these characters, and footage was investigated through questionnaires before and after the video had been viewed. The title of the video is “Let’s Learn about the Functions of a Residents’ Organization from a Disaster Documentary.”
The differences between the pre- and post-evaluation results were analyzed statistically. The post-evaluation results were higher than the pre-evaluation results with significant differences in three measurements. These measurements were “victims’ ability to image themselves in a disaster situation,” “understanding of actions taken by victims in a disaster situation,” and “eagerness to learn disaster management.” These results demonstrated that the video with seriousness and familiarity had a positive influence on imagination, understanding, and eagerness to learn.
Besides, in order to analyze the evaluation of the video, the correlation between the measurements was analyzed. Consequently, the “popularity of the video” was found to be correlated with “familiarity with computer-animated characters,” “intelligibility of content,” and “eagerness to learn disaster management.” These results demonstrated that familiarity with computer-animated characters, intelligibility, and eagerness to learn disaster management had a positive impact on the popularity of the video.
The findings indicated that the video with seriousness and familiarity had a positive influence in helping people learn disaster management. Teaching materials should have seriousness such as footage of disaster documentary and familiarity such as computer-animated characters to learn disaster management. Computer-animated characters can facilitate learning in the workshop. Currently, this video is used by citizen groups and the administration in Japan.

Keywords:

Learning Disaster Management, Computer-Animated Character, Video.