Games ready to use: A serious game for teaching natural risk management

Résumé En

Risk management has become an essential skill for civil engineers. Teaching risk management to engineering students is therefore crucial, but is also challenging: it looks too abstract to students, and practical works are complex and expensive to organise. It also involves interconnected mechanisms coupling human and technical aspects, that are difficult to explain. In order to support risk management teaching, we propose SPRITE, an agent-based serious game using a concrete case study which is exemplary in terms of risk management: the coastal floods on the Oleron Island (France). SPRITE places the player (student) in the role of a local councillor of the Oleron Island, who must ensure the safety and well-being of the island residents, while maximising performance w.r.t. economic and environmental issues, in a context of coastal flood risk. SPRITE is the central piece of a pedagogical sequence which is actually used in risk management courses at Bordeaux University. This paper describes the SPRITE serious game and the underlying agent-based model, and reports on some lessons learnt from its use in a risk management course.