Crisis Response Serious Spatial Thinking Games: Spatial Think Aloud Study Results

We present work on developing and evaluating a serious GIS spatial thinking game called SerGIS. We conducted a spatial think-aloud study with ten participants new to crisis response who used SerGIS with a coastal city hurricane scenario. Four themes emerged from participant responses: processes of reasoning, tools of representation, overlay and dissolve operation, and geographic information concept learning and knowledge gaps. The first three themes match directly with the spatial thinking theory and evaluation underlying SerGIS. The fourth theme identified addresses GIS and spatial thinking crisis response educational issues. Furthermore, statistical evidence indicates there is likely a relationship between participants from spatially-oriented backgrounds (but with no GIS experience) performing better with SerGIS than participants from non-spatial backgrounds. Finally, we found that with a game scenario based on established disaster management practitioner literature, participants could focus on spatial thinking tasks and not be limited by understanding the game scenario itself.