Abstract

Emergency management systems require skills from decision makers to mitigate the impact of disasters, reducing fatalities and economic losses. Virtual learning environments have the potential to support the development of those capabilities. In particular, situated learning grounded on serious video games may promote the legitimate peripheral participation of learners to develop resilience capacities and become part of the community of practice. In this paper, a game-based virtual environment is proposed and validated to apply situated learning in a real-world learning community. As a result, the video game virtual environment seems to reinforce the learner engagement in the educational content. In addition, video game technology has a potential to be applied in other learning processes for extending learning experiences, and to transfer knowledge to new situations of disasters and emergency situations, including the participation of facilitators in prevention education efforts for disaster risk reduction.