Risk Perception: make it fun! Examples of serious games to educate risk perception

Risk perception is a concept of fundamental importance for the resilience of societies. An important effort to raise the level of risk awareness must be made by the scientific community, which must adopt innovative communication techniques to get closer to the local community. A striking example of how crucial scientific communication is to risk perception was and still is Covid 19. Which allowed us to appreciate how important, if not necessary, it is to focus the energies of the scientific community not only on pure research, but also on how its outputs are communicated to the public.

It is therefore of fundamental importance for the scientific and civil community to disseminate information on the subject to create greater individual awareness and sensitivity, and to enable all citizens to make a tangible contribution to environmental protection through virtuous behaviour in everyday life, even outside the school/work context. The possibilities of risk mitigation, in fact, depend not only on the scientific community but also on how well prepared and informed society is about the risk itself. It is, therefore, crucial to train the local population to increase disaster risk preparedness and resilience of the society.

The younger generation plays a key role in the scientific awareness of society, representing both the future of society and a conduit to reach and educate their families.

In this perspective, the use of Serious Games, which is certainly an innovative practice in science communication, is gaining momentum since it favours participants' learning through their active involvement in the activities.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed, using serious games, two didactic experiences, one dedicated to seismic risk (ALARM) and the other dedicated to climate change (Finding Gaia), targeting secondary school students, their families and science enthusiasts. Both experiences are characterised by an approach that is virtual and inclusive, allowing participation to people with motor disabilities, and fully interactive, through a series of quizzes, puzzles, and tasks of different difficulty, to include more and less experts/enthusiasts and exploit not only top-down but also peer-to-peer learning.

Moreover, these experiences encourage the use of certain topics by allowing the basic concepts to be used in everyday life while the guidance of experts throughout the game allow a critical understanding of the topic.

Before the start and at the end of any of these activities, an evaluation phase was carried out to assess the learning experience and the effectiveness of the science communication technique. For both practices, it was also found that, thanks to the introduction of the serious game, the virtual characteristic of the experience was evaluated as not negative, even though all the experiences were carried out during the COVID19 pandemic, with obvious repercussions on the disposition of the participants.

This work has been supported by CORE ("sCience and human factor for Resilient sociEty") project, funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 - research and innovation program under grant agreement No 101021746 and by PRIN-MATISSE (20177EPPN2) project funded by Italian Ministry of Education and Research.