Disasters can happen to anyone. Disaster education (e.g., evacuation drills) is an excellent way to protect people from disasters. However, these measures are not widely implemented in modern society. People are not necessarily motivated to undertake conventional disaster education. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has the capacity to change this situation. ICT-based Disaster Education (ICTDE) can contribute to protection from and survival in disasters. This review gives an overview of present and future of ICTDE systems, including an examination of frequently used systems (e.g., simulations and virtual reality), in association with two proposed disaster education models. A practical example drawn from the author’s own ICTDE experience is also described.

In the study field of disaster education, it is indicated that the opportunities of being interest at a decision-making process in disaster prevention behavior were increasing. First, this paper reviews some previous studies about psychological theories, disaster prevention behavior models based on the theories, and an emergency decision making model from perspective of human information processing as a theoretical framework for predicting human behavior. In addition, the paper reviews some human cognitive characteristics distorting understanding and interpretation of disaster information. Second, the author proposes a new decision making model referring to these theoretical frameworks and explain the model with reference to some evacuation behavior studies. Finally, the author tries to expand the model for applying it to evacuation drills.

Increases in damage caused by frequent unauthorized access and information leakage due to security accidents are getting major social problems. According to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s report in FY 2016, the information security engineers in Japan predict that the shortfall will expand to 200,000 in 2020. From such social background, effective training of network security engineers is desired. By learning security by books, we will acquire systematic knowledge. In order to acquire advanced skills, practical skills through practical training and exercises are effective. Therefore, a practical training environment/learning support system with a simulator realized by software and an emulator utilizing a virtual environment has been proposed, and future development is greatly expected. In this paper, we introduce case examples of practical training/learning support for learning network security and network security learning support system using the virtual machine environment developed by the author.

This paper describes Japanese informatics education in new curriculum. In elementary schools pupils experience programming in each subject. In junior high schools students make robot control and communication programs. In high schools students learn algorithm, database, data science and information systems.

In the present study, we propose a learning support method to raise self-awareness of the inconsistency between knowledge and action in information ethics. The proposed method, which consisted of two phases, was applied to the lecture for first-year university students. In the first phase, students answered two tasks: behavior selection task to confirm the knowledge-to-action gap, and behavior evaluation task to ensure factors contributing to the gap. These tasks are constructed based on an experiment of cognitive psychology. In the next phase, students were shown the graph of experimental result as feedback. As results of the evaluation of learning activities, it allowed students to capture the gap as their own matters and to recognize the activities as learning opportunity on information ethics. In addition, the method enhances motivation of the participants toward learning information ethical behavior.

It is not difficult for residents to understand the knowledge of disaster prevention. However, people sometimes cannot easily use such knowledge to take safe evacuation actions. For example, it is quite difficult to decide safe evacuation action taking account of various preconditions such as hazardous areas and height of the location in the building. In the present study, a tool for disaster prevention learning is developed as a flow diagram to select an appropriate evacuation action specifying the preconditions along the flow. In this study, we propose a learning support method with the selection diagram using reverse-thinking problems, which follow the flow in arbitrary order to make learners think about the rationale behind the selection. As results of the user evaluation, it was confirmed that the proposed method could give learners opportunities of considering the reasons for the selections, and understanding action guidelines for safe evacuation.

In this study, we aim to enable learners to act based on their own judgment during disasters by practicing evacuation drills. We developed a system called “ES3” that supports learning to make good judgments. This system presents a virtual situation based on the evacuation drill scenarios and urges learners to make judgments and take action. As a result of practicing disaster-prevention drills using the system in a high school, it was confirmed that learners judged the situations by themselves. From the results of the subjective survey, changes were noticed in the ability of learners to make consciousness judgments and recognize dangerous outdoor places and places that could be evacuated, all of which were achieved through the drills. The results of this study reveal that learners have become interested in disasters and have developed an awareness of the need to act proactively as a result of the judgment drills.

The purpose of this study is to develop a learning tool for the synchronization of communication protocol at the data link layer. Our subjects are high school students. The learning objectives of this tool is to foster understanding about asynchronous system of bit synchronization, character synchronization and error detection and correction method. In this paper, related studies about learning tools for network protocol are show. Then, tool designs of out proposals are described. Finally, we discuss the effectiveness of our hands-on tool.

Recently, the number of people who will learn programming has been expected to increase. People use e-learning systems as an environment in which they can learn programming alone. However, when beginners use the systems for practical programming training, they need to be assessed because learning alone is difficult. In this study, we developed a fill-in-the-blank worksheet system for practical programming training of beginners with assessment adapted to student ability on the basis of item response theory. To see the effects of learning with the developed system, we performed an experiment with beginners learning programming. The results suggested that the system enhanced beginners’ development to increase their programming ability.

To efficiently support novice programming learners feeling programming difficult, clarifying the cause of preventing programming understanding, and developing a new teaching method appropriate for their understanding degree would be necessary. To analyze each student’s understanding level, this study focuses on eye movement which is strongly affected by accumulated programming experience, and proposes program structure based analysis method during program reading. The proposed method is inspired by the concept of program slicing. This paper especially examines the relationship between the data dependence relationship in the program consisting only of assignment operations and arithmetic operations and the gaze transition pattern represented by a simple Markov process. From the experimental results, we found meaningful relationship between the two.

We developed a comprehensive learning-support system for Scratch, a visual programming language. It provides automatic assessment of computational thinking concepts such as conditional statements, loops, data, and parallelism in order to develop students’ programming skills. It also provides more than 60 sample functions that are commonly used in Scratch projects, and analyzes automatically which functions are used in a project. The system could be used in supporting mentors and learners of programming learning, and analyzing a lot of programs to understand how learners master programming.