Designing teaching materials with disaster maps and evaluating its effectiveness for primary students

Abstract

One of the most important parts of disaster management and disaster risk reduction strategies is the special vulnerability of children and the need to increase disaster awareness among them. It is very effective to design and develop awareness-raising tools suitable for children’s learning needs in this process. The main purpose of this study is to contribute to raising awareness of disasters among children in Turkey. With the study, risk maps for forest fire, landslide, flood, earthquake, and avalanche in Turkey were designed, and materials were developed by equipping them with disaster-themed texts. A questionnaire was applied to 165 students in the 10–11 age group with these interesting and entertaining materials. The results indicate that the study increased students’ ability to learn about disasters with maps by an average of 39%.

Keywords

• cartographic design
• disaster maps for children
• disaster awareness
• geographic information system