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The need for improvement of societal disaster resilience and response efforts was evident after the destruction caused by the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. We present a novel conceptual framework for improving disaster resilience through the combination of serious games, geographic information systems (GIS), spatial thinking, and disaster resilience. Our framework is implemented via Project Lily Pad, a serious geogame based on our conceptual framework, serious game case studies, interviews and real-life experiences from 2017 Hurricane Harvey survivors in Dickinson, TX, and an immersive hurricane-induced flooding scenario. The game teaches a four-fold set of skills relevant to spatial thinking and disaster resilience, including reading a map, navigating an environment, coding verbal instructions, and determining best practices in a disaster situation. Results of evaluation of the four skills via Project Lily Pad through a “think aloud” study conducted by both emergency management novices and professionals revealed that the game encouraged players to think spatially, can help build awareness for disaster response scenarios, and has potential for real-life use by emergency management professionals. It can be concluded from our results that the combination of serious games, geographic information systems (GIS), spatial thinking, and disaster resilience, as implemented via Project Lily Pad and our evaluation results, demonstrated the wide range of possibilities for using serious geogames to improve disaster resilience spatial thinking and potentially save lives when disasters occur. 

Hurricane Harvey caused massive damage and necessitated the need for identification of areas under high risk. During Harvey, the city of Houston received more than 77000 3-1-1 calls for assistance. Due to damage caused to the infrastructure, it became difficult to handle and respond to the crisis. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are a vital technology to assist with real-time disaster monitoring. In this regard, for this work-in-progress paper, we investigated if a correlation could be found between 3-1-1 data calls made during Hurricane Harvey and aerial images captured during the event. Specifically, we were interested to see if 3-1-1 data could be ground-truthed via hot spot analysis. Our preliminary results indicate that visual representation of 3-1-1 call data can aid in analyzing the expected areas of high traffic of calls for assistance and plan an effective way to manage resources. Future work will involve more in-depth analysis of combined 3-1-1 call data with satellite imagery using image classification techniques.