Experience Learning in Primary Schools for Disaster Prevention with Hydraulic Models

In recent years, we had many natural disasters in Japan, and casualties have learned many things from these disasters. Extreme flood disasters made an attack on many people and make them to think about the self-counter measures how to save their own life. Structural measures were not enough to mitigate flood disaster, because magnitude of extreme flood was over the design flood. Disaster prevention education is one of non-structural measures and becomes increasingly importance. In this paper, results of experience learning in primary schools with original hydraulic models are discussed. One of them is a diorama city model of about 1/00 scale and able to simulate pluvial, fluvial and tsunami flood. The other is real size model of car door that people are able to know which water depth in front of the door is the critical depth not to open it and escape from submerged car. The 1031 children of the third and fourth grade in 9 primary schools were experienced this. The 9 schools are in the area where is prone to pluvial, fluvial, storm-surge or tsunami flood. They could understand what happen during flood and how strong the hydraulic pressure is. Questionnaire about the knowledge and understanding for flood disaster prevention were conducted before and after the learning, and each child was scored in terms of understanding flood phenomena. From the results of questionnaire, it is found that the score increased 1.7 times as much as those of having before the experience learning.