Elementary School Students’ View to The Educational Game for Children’s Awareness of Disaster

Abstract

Located near to the equator, Bandung—the capital city of West Java province—have high rainfall. This city has been struggling to minimise floods that often occur every year. It was caused by the bad citizen’s behavior, such as, not sorting garbage, littering and throw trash into the river. In addition, Bandung also vulnerable to the earthquake that might be occurred due to the shifting of Lembang plate. On the other hand, the ownership of smartphone in Indonesia has been raised year by year. It is no exception for elementary school-age children because there is no strict rule from school to limit the smartphone use. According to the problem, the used smartphone among primary school children should be maximised not only for supporting formal education but also for informal learning. This paper presents the preliminary study of children’s’ awareness of disaster. The aim of the study was to gauge the students’ perspective on the use of the smartphone as a mobile game gadget for learning disaster awareness. 12 students of elementary school involved in the various ways of learning disaster awareness. The result of the study shows that the younger students (grades 1-2) tend to enjoy learning disaster preparedness by the storytelling, the older students (grade 6) satisfied by reading the written article. But the average of students (grades 3-5) most interest to learn disaster awareness content through an online game. However, the majority of students felt that mobile game gives more engagement than others learning way.