Treme-treme - A serious game to teach children earthquake preparedness

Earthquakes are known as one of the most dangerous natural hazards due to their unpredictability, and because it is not possible to know when a major seismic activity will occur, it is highly recommended to be prepared. Due to the growing interest in Serious games unique characteristics to teach and train individuals, there was an opportunity of using Serious games to better prepare and inform people about earthquakes. This work describes a Serious game that was developed to teach elementary school children about common practices and procedures to take before, during and after an earthquake as well as warn them about the risks and promote discussion among the students and diffuse this knowledge to their families. To achieve this, we investigated the characteristics of Serious Games and studied games with similar purposes in order to create a game able to entertain while teaching pedagogical content. Through the results obtained from the tests conducted we can conclude that our game was able to successfully achieve it’s purpose, being able to rise awareness about earthquake preparedness in schools.