Development and Evaluation of a Shelter Simulator Using Gamification.

As a part of disaster preparedness, smartphone applications for disaster information sharing is considered as effective. There is a wide range of disaster prevention applications. Among them, we focus on obtaining knowledge of lives in an evacuation shelter, which are difficult to learn in daily lives. In this paper, we develop and evaluate a simulation application for living in an evacuation shelter using the concept of gamification (serious games) to gain knowledge and experience of living in an evacuation shelter. During playing the application, the users answer quizzes related to lives in a shelter, and are expected to learn knowledge on the lives. Two subject experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the application by comparing with the results of learning evacuation shelter information by only by documents. Currently, the application is freely available as a Mac or Windows application.