Game-based education for disaster prevention

Taiwan experiences typhoons on a yearly basis, and the accompanying heavy rain often causes flooding and damage. Local decision makers invest heavily in flood prevention measures and thus need to allocate resources wisely to minimize the destruction caused. To educate future decision makers, we developed a flood game to encourage players’ active learning by exploration. The game design is based on “Shikakeology” and “game-initiated learning” methods. Through the design of the game, a change in behavior is initiated by allowing players to face real-world flooding problems and discuss problems related to flood disaster management. Following gameplay, the instructors will introduce information useful in solving flood-related problems. From the feedback of review meetings, game-initiated learning was recognized as an educational method with great potential in teaching disaster management. Five public activities have been held, including three high school camps and two exhibitions. Among the students who participated in the high school camps, 92 % of the students thought the game was helpful in teaching disaster prevention strategies. Ninety-six percentage of those that attended the exhibitions said they would like to play the game again, and 98 % of the participants indicated that they would pay more attention to the issues surrounding disaster prevention. This indicates that game-initiated learning is able to stimulate learning for the participants.