Are you Ready! to take early action? Embedding serious gaming into community managed DRR in Bangladesh

This paper applies a Game-based Learning Evaluation Model (GEM) to assess whether the early warning – early action serious game “Ready!” is an effective component to add to existing Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) training curricula, facilitated by NGO staff and applied at the community level. We developed a paper-based survey with 17 five-level Likert items and 15 open questions addressing the different GEM indicators to question 16 NGO staff, and used a simplified set of five questions with emoticons for 58 community people. The results showed that the staff saw great potential in embedding Ready! in DRR processes and that the community highly appreciated the game. The GEM was found to be a useful methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of this serious game. However, in the context of a lower educated and partly illiterate community, the importance of designing an individual, largely visual assessment instrument instead of a paper-based survey was acknowledged.