Inspiration
Across the world, natural disasters are occurring more frequently and with greater intensity. With the world changing constantly due to climate change caused by unsustainable practices, we are seeing more and more natural events out of balance, causing destruction and affecting our own lives. More than a 100 million people were affected, and more than 10000 people are killed from natural disaster each year. That needs to change.
Disaster Risk Reduction, or DRR, is a critical part of sustainable development. There are multiple parts to DRR:
Awareness - Knowledge of sustainable practices and the effects of unsustainable ones. Education - Learning how to practice sustainability and stay safe in natural disaster events. Resilience - Being able to put skills and knowledge in practice to survive in the changing world
Yet, most platforms that try to address the issue of disaster risk reduction do not consider children in their planning. Most learning methods offer articles or scientific videos complicated by jargon, which even many adults may not understand. Is a 10 year old going to read a scientific article and remember anything about staying safe? Most apps offer solely one way to address disaster risk reduction. To address this, to make our platform appealing to children and send it out to the world, we wanted to create a fun, engaging, gamified platform. Everything is color-coded, our 3D simulations include animations and customization, our chatbots are specially created to use absolutely no scientific jargon, an the same is true of our informational pages.
Our inspiration for DisasterPrep was to create the complete disaster safety platform: Multimodal learning - visual, conversational, textual, and virtually kinesthetic learning. The platform's design is meant to be family-family and child-friendly, so it is truly used for natural disaster safety education.
Our platform addresses every part of Disaster Risk Reduction in multiple ways, fit for any age and any mentality. Multimodal learning is the key to addressing risk reduction and creating a more resilient, sustainable world.
Put simply, DisasterPrep focuses on disaster safety technology in a whole new way. The very premise of this platform is MULTIMODAL education, not complicated by jargon, helpful for absolutely anyone regardless of how they learn.
What it does
DisasterPrep focuses on disaster risk reduction. Our app offers a multitude of features making it accessible to anyone, and fit for everyone.
Realistic 3D Physics Simulations. DisasterPrep offer 3D simulations of natural disasters, for the visual learner. Built using Unity, these simulations offer a visual experience to learn about natural disasters. There are two main options in these simulations - Experimentation Mode, and Learning Mode. In experimentation mode, the user can customize their simulation, see what would happen in different scenarios. For example, they can change the magnitude of an earthquake to see what would realistically happen. In learning mode, users are met with various interactive question-answers, so they gain the knowledge necessary for different situations for that natural disaster.
DisasterPal DisasterPal is your personal ML and NLU assistant, built to answer any questions you have about natural disaster safety. DisasterPal is for the conversational learner, and is capable of answer queries and providing information about various natural disaster events, safety, preparation, and so on.
Green Guide GreenGuide is yet another ML chatbot, to conversationally educate you about sustainability practices and how they relate to disaster risk reduction. Ask away about how to help the environment, how unsustainable practices affect our planet and lead to natural disaster events, and how you personally can create a more green, safe world for the future.
Information Pages Information pages are for the textual learner. While not everyone learns best through text, there are of course those who prefer reading to gain knowledge. Information pages contain thorough, easily accessible information about sustainability, disaster risk reduction, natural disaster events, and how to practice sustainable practices and stay safe and resilient.
Clean, Intuitive UI UI is of course a valuable part of any platform. Our UI is based on simplicity and is easy to understand. With children being a major part of our target audience, we use absolutely no complex jargon in finding information. Everything is reachable within only one or two clicks, and it is completely obvious where any information is located, whether our 3D simulations, chatbots, or information pages. Everything is even color-coded to make the experience all the more clean and intuitive.
How we built it
Our main app is created with React Native and JS. From this app, a user can access any information they need or want through the sidebar, such as the simulations, chatbots, info pages, settings, and contact pages.
The 3D simulations are built using C# in the Unity Engine. Each natural disaster event includes its own simulation with both Experimentation and Learning modes, and the user can choose either one and use the platform how they want to or need to at any point. All of the models used in the simulations were made by us using the Blender software. The simulations are hosted using HTML/CSS and WebGL.
The chatbots are built using ML and NLU in Python, hosted on Render and are accessible through the main app. Firebase is used for contact us queries and user settings, to allow them to customize the app and tailor it to their liking.
Challenges we ran into
With so many features, DisasterPrep was often a challenge to build. One of the main challenges came from integrating the simulations and chatbots into the main app.
Integrating Unity especially into React Native was difficult as there weren't many options. After a while of looking at different options and testing them out, we were finally able to create a one-button click solution to reaching the simulations, by building for WebGL and implementing mobile touch controls.
Integrating the chatbots was also difficult in some ways. The packages used in React-Native were not directly compatible with the return format of our chatbots hosted on Render. It took a good amount of testing and trials to get it working, but it is certainly a core feature of our platform and we are glad we were able to implement it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Prior to building this app, we didn't have very much experience with many parts of it, particularly with the 3D aspects. We are incredibly satisfied to have been able to learn and implement 3D simulations for each of the natural disasters so our platform can provide a visual and tangible learning experience. We are also very happy with how our entire platform turned out. The UI is very clean and responsive, and the chatbots have been optimized to fit with the frontend and provide meaningful responses. Ensuring that the app would work with children, color-coding our UI, specially editing our chatbots to remove jargon, and so on, also took significant time and effort, especially with the details, and we hope that this platform will make a difference in disaster safety education.
What we learned
We learned that putting together so many features can be difficult but certainly not impossible. We learned how to work with new software and will certainly use these skills in the future. Starting this project, it seemed very difficult and at many points we thought we had reached an impossible wall, but in the end there was always some solution. We will definitely continue improving upon the platform and making it even more helpful in the future. .
What's next for DisasterPrep
So that children, and anyone else, can adopt this platform and use it to learn about natural disaster safety, we plan to publish this app, for example in the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. With accessibility in mind, we built it with React Native, to make it functional with multiple platforms. Another huge step in the adoption of this platform involves testing and feedback. Who better to test our platform than 1) Children, its main target audience, and 2) Professionals and First Responders, who know the ins and outs of safety.
Our plan is to publish the app and conduct beta tests, with first of all schools, first responders, and so on. This includes both local schools and first responders, and ones in other communities and areas, to see how our platform holds up in different conditions and places in the world. Especially with a safety app, it's important that the information is correct and that the platform can provide help for anyone in any place. We have thoroughly researched any information in our app to ensure this, and testing with professionals will only improve the usefulness and reliability of our platform. It is also important that the app is tailored exactly to how the target audience needs it to be. This is the reason for our 3D simulations, which are very gamified, including animations (and more in the works), customizability, and so on. A gamified experience is more likely to appeal to children. This is also the reason for including so many forms of learning. Everyone learns differently and it is important to cover the entire scope. Thus, we can ensure that our product is 1) factual and providing truly useful information, 2) appealing to children, and to anyone else, and 3) Is available to anyone and everyone on any platform (iOS, Android, etc...).
The plan is for DisasterPrep and safety education to become a core part of learning for children and a similar resource for anyone else because we believe that such a platform is necessary, especially considering the changing world. By introducing this app to schools and first responders in different communities, testing, iterating, and improving, and giving anyone and everyone access to the platform through the App Stores, we are able to provide this disaster safety education to everyone. To scale for a large number of customers, we specifically used tools capable to handling this scale. We are definitely able to increase the capabilities of our server-end operations as needed and spent a significant amount of time researching on and integrating our Unity simulations locally on-device. By starting testing with schools and first responders and making this platform available everywhere, and using software that can scale as needed, we can both iteratively improve our platform, and we can provide everyone access to a complete, thorough, engaging, and easy-to-use natural disaster safety education platform.
In terms of features, we have many plans for DisasterPrep in the future. Some more features we could add include integration with early warning system, creating and communicating through groups with friends and family, additional simulations, AI image recognition features to help with practicing sustainability, and so much more. There's always more to be created, with any app or platform, and we certainly plan to do so with DisasterPrep, especially based on testing and expanding to accommodate everyone, stay family and child-friendly, and provide a truly educational, helpful, reliable, and fun disaster safety education experience.
So, in summary: DisasterPrep is a knowledge-in-action mobile application platform for natural disaster awareness, education and preparedness. DisasterPrep centers around multimodal learning, providing complete disaster safety learning options for visual, conversational, and textual learners. Our primary target audience is children, and the app tailors to this audience as well as anyone else who needs or wants natural disaster safety education. Our UI is color-coded, the 3D simulations include animations, customization, and are in general gamified to be family and child-friendly, and our chatbots and informational pages are specially created to use absolutely no complex jargon. The whole point is to engage and educate to children, through gamification and simplicity of understanding, something which is becoming increasingly necessary. In order to effectively support anyone and everyone, our platform must be able to scale. Hence, we ensured that all the tools and software we used is scalable. Our 3D simulations run on-device, and the chatbots server and firebase are certainly scalable regardless of demand. Looking at the future, we first must consider the measures of success of our platform, quantitative and qualitative. Our ultimate goal is to make an impact on homes, schools, and communities. Therefore, the success of our platform, qualitatively, will be measured by ratings and reviews, with feedback, and information on the experience from the user's perspectives. Quantitatively, the measures of success include number of people that learned something from our app, user retention - specifically children coming back to learn more, and how many users we can retain and continue to provide natural disaster safety education to, To reach high levels of these measures of success, we have a plan for the future. DisasterPrep will be published on App Stores, to make it available for anyone and everyone. We will evangelize and engage in pilots and tests with children, in many communities, and with first responders and officials. From these pilots and beta tests, we can gather feedback on the user experience and educational experience. This will allow us to iteratively improve our platform across multiple version of our app. Each time, it will become more comprehensive, more helpful, more educative, more engaging, and ultimate a more complete disaster safety education platform, with the goal of providing the best, and most informative, engaging experience so any user, especially children, can learn everything they need to about natural disaster safety and be prepared for the changing world.
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