Abstract:

In recent years, large-scale natural disasters have often occurred all over the world and many people have been aware of the importance of disaster prevention. A promising approach to disaster prevention is education. However, it is difficult to establish DPE (Disaster Prevention Education) acceptable to all people. For example, transferring comprehensive knowledge one-sidedly cannot raise their interest in disaster prevention.

We think that fun, locality, and creativity are important in sustainable DPE. We have already realized the fun and the locality as game-based evacuation drill using RWE (Real World Edutainment). In this drill, digital contents representing virtual disaster situations associated with to a participant’s current location are presented on his/her table computer according to a branched scenario and he/she can think about appropriate behaviors in real evacuation. In other words, this drill is DPE through adventure game set in his/her local area (e.g., resident area) in the real world.

Focusing on the creativity, we develop a Web-based scenario authoring system for the game-based evacuation drill. This system enables people to upload sharable materials (e.g., image and sound) and visualize an evacuation scenario by connecting the uploaded materials and adding branching conditions on a standard Web browser. For realistic evacuation scenarios, they have to learn their local areas and disaster prevention. Such scenario authoring can increase the creativity and then embody learning outcomes as the game-based evacuation drill.

Keywords:

Scenario authoring, Web-based system, Disaster prevention education, Game-based learning.