Educational Escape Room for Disaster Preparedness and Response Training

Human-made and natural disasters are constantly occurring, and citizens need to be aware of their protection. Although disaster education is considered an important aspect of disaster preparedness, it relies mostly on conventional lectures given by experts on disaster prevention. However, a fundamental problem of this method of delivery is that lectures are based on the information transmission fallacy, the idea that students learn just by being told. Although lectures may increase risk perception, they do not automatically enable youth to know the importance of pre-event preparations and to take action to reduce disaster risk. To overcome the key obstacle of lack of motivation, this study proposes an alternative approach to lecturing – active learning activities using escape room concepts. This paper provides considerations forresearchers and organisations concerning the development of a portable educational escape room about disaster preparedness. A total of 84 young adults aged 13-20 participated in a 30-minute escape room activity and postgame debriefing. An attitude questionnaire and focus groups were used to evaluate student experience in terms of satisfaction, quality of the escape room, and the impact of the escape room on learning. Most participants found their experience very engaging and reported that the game helped them gain new knowledge about fire safety and disaster response. Thesefindings suggest that the escape room intervention can be used as a potential avenue to facilitate learning and increase disaster preparedness and response knowledge