Mark and Peter attended the Anglesea Fire Education Initiative Workshop on 30th November. The Anglesea CFA and Melbourne School of Population and Global Health established an early education project in Anglesea. This project teaches year 5 students in the Anglesea Primary School about essential bushfire knowledges to improve community resilience. Having work all year in the program, the children gave their first public lecture to adults living in Anglesea about several different aspects of bushfires.
In the first session the children demonstrated the characteristics of the progression and impact of bushfires through a vivid experiment (see right). Then, the children explained how to evacuate during a bushfire, and the importance of have a fire plan in prior to a bushfire. The third session introduced the roles of emergency management authorities, such as EMV, CFA, DELWP, Police, etc (see below), and how the community should seek help from these authorities.
In the final session the children simulated the daily fire danger report the during bushfire season. The children also taught the audience the calculation of fire danger index and the significance of planned burns in constraining fire spread.
The children demonstrated impressive knowledge in understanding bushfires and minimizing the impact of bushfire. The novel children-teaching-adults education scenario achieved excellent outcomes. RISER assisted this educational project by introducing the RISERnet wireless sensor network technology to the children. The children learned the process of generating and analyzing real-time data streams of weather conditions for improved situational awareness during bushfires. The children will give more public lectures which will include real-time weather condition monitoring using our RISERnet networks.
