Games Ready to Use: A Serious Game for Teaching Natural Risk Management

Abstract

Risk management has become an essential skill for civil engineers. Teaching risk management to engineering students is therefore crucial, but is also challenging: it looks too abstract to students, and practical works are complex and expensive to organise. It also involves interconnected mechanisms coupling human and technical aspects, that are difficult to explain. In order to support risk management teaching, we propose SPRITE, an agent-based serious game using a concrete case study which is exemplary in terms of risk management: the coastal floods on the Oleron Island (France). SPRITE places the player (student) in the role of a local councillor of the Oleron Island, who must ensure the safety and well-being of the island residents, while maximising performance w.r.t. economic and environmental issues, in a context of coastal flood risk. SPRITE is the central piece of a pedagogical sequence which is actually used in risk management courses at Bordeaux University. This paper describes the SPRITE serious game and the underlying agent-based model, and reports on some lessons learnt from its use in a risk management course. Keywords: Serious game, risk management teaching, ABMS share the same case-study, their approach and purpose are completely different. LittoSIM is more realistic and more complex than SPRITE, because it is intended for local authorities, who have a strong knowledge of the Oleron territory. It was not designed for teaching, but to make experts reflect on their strategy for the Island. The difference of target player and objectives led to different modeling and game design choices, making the two models very different. In particular they differ on the available player actions, the user interface, the game rules and objectives, the simulation mechanisms and level of realism, etc. This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 briefly discusses some literature about the use of serious games for teaching in general, and teaching risk management in particular. Section 3 introduces our case study (the coastal flood risk on the Oleron island) and the SPRITE conceptual agent-based model, designed to raise awareness about that risk. Section 4 describes the serious game based on this model, its game design and its implementation. Section 5 introduces the methodology and first results of our evaluation of the use of SPRITE for teaching risk management. Finally, Section 6 concludes and discusses future prospects.

Building, composing and experimenting complex spatial models with the GAMA platform

“…For example, Sprite [61] allows a participant to play the role of the mayor of the Oleron island in France. The goal of the participant is to find an appropriate balance between popularity, economy, attractiveness, ecology and safety, in particular concerning the submersion risk.…”

Behavioural Effects of Spatially Structured Scoring Systems in Location-Based Serious Games—A Case Study in the Context of OpenStreetMap

“…Some games go beyond mere entertainment in order to serve additional purposes. Those purposes can be as diverse as language learning [10][11][12], environmental and sustainability education [13][14][15], and online public participation [16][17][18]. Those types of games are referred to as 'serious games' [5,19], and what makes them interesting in the research context and for GIScience, in particular, is their ability to attract and include ordinary citizens in research-related activities.…”

To play or not to play: on the motivational effects of games in engineering education

“…The use of games as educational tools has gained increased interest over the last decennia in many engineering fields including software engineering (Maxim et al 2016;Valle et al 2017;Calderón et al 2018), mechanical engineering (Braghirolli et al 2016;Chang et al 2016;Mavromihales, Holmes, and Racasan 2019), civil engineering (Alanne 2016;Oo and Lim 2016;Taillandier and Adam 2018) and electrical engineering (Callaghan et al 2015;Bahadoorsingh, Dyer, and Sharma 2016;Padilla et al 2016). Referred to as educational games, their primary purpose is to educate and train the player, which differentiates them from pure entertainment games.…”