## 1 Introduction  
Disasters are uncertain events that cause significant loss of life, damage property and infrastructure, and disrupt the regular community lifestyle [1, 2]. The 2010 Haiti earthquake, 2012 Hurricane Sandy, 2013 European floods, 2013 typhoon Haiyan, 2017 Sierra Leone flood and landslides, and 2019 Australian bushfires are some of the devastating natural disasters that have taken place in the recent past. From 1998 to 2017, disaster-hit countries have reported a direct economic loss of around US $2.9 trillion [3]. Furthermore, over 1.3 million lives were lost, and over 4.4 billion people left injured, displaced, homeless or requiring assistance [3, 4]. Such disaster-induced impacts could be mitigated by delivering a proper education to prepare for disasters, which is argued to be a 'black hole' in most disaster-related studies [4]. As disasters are uncertain in nature, delivering an appropriate education frequently to the community to prepare for disasters has become a pressing need. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 identified the significance of strengthening public education and awareness to make people well prepared to face disasters [5]. With technological developments such as social media and online learning platforms, a multitude of new avenues have emerged to enhance disaster education [6, 7, 8]. Unfortunately, there is only limited research which looks at the need for upgrading disaster education through innovative and novel perspectives [4; 9; 10]. There are four modes of disaster education. These are: (a) formal education, (b) non-formal education, (c) informal education, and (d) incidental and random education [4]. Formal disaster education refers to the institutionalized and planned education delivered through a well-planned curriculum. Non-formal disaster education also relates to formal education, where institutionalized and planned education is delivered through extracurricular activities. Informal education includes learnings from day-to-day activities. Mostly, this kind of informal education refers to community meetings and training and learning through social media. Incidental and random education refers to the forms of education methods which are not deliberately designed to deliver education. This includes education strategies such as learning through news broadcasts [4]. Nevertheless, both formal and non-formal education are the most popular forms of education which are delivered through workshops or in typical school settings [11]. Against this backdrop, the study aim was to identify public perceptions towards novel disaster education methods. Accordingly, this paper attempts to address two research questions. The first research question was 'How do the public perceive novel disaster education methods?' To address this issue, the study first evaluated community perceptions about the prevailing disaster education methods through a Twitter data analysis. The second research question was 'How effective is the use of the gamification method in increasing public awareness?'. The study addressed this research question by taking into consideration the 2019-2020 Australian Black Summer bushfires as the case study and 'STOP Disasters' as the gamified application to evaluate the awareness changes in a group of 52 university students. In line with these two research questions, the study adopted and tested the hypothesis 'Gamified applications related to disasters are efficient modes for increasing community disaster awareness'. A study by [12] classified 35 gamified applications related to disasters into three classes based on their objectives--gamified applications that collect data for research [13; 14; 15; 16; 17]; gamified applications that aim to increase disaster education among people [13; 18; 19; 20], and gamified applications that try to intervene in existing practices [21; 22; 23]. Nevertheless, none of the studies have tried to understand the effectiveness of using gamified applications such as that on which this study is based.