Baltimore , Maryland
June 25, 2023
June 25, 2023
June 28, 2023
Civil Engineering Division (CIVIL)
Diversity
10
10.18260/1-2--42808
https://peer.asee.org/42808
172
Eun Jeong Cha is an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Dr. Cha holds a Ph.D. (2012) and a M.S. (2009) in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a B.S. (2006) in Architectural Engineering from Seoul National University, South Korea. Her awards and honors include the NSF Next Generation of Hazards and Disasters Researchers Fellowship in 2015 and the UIUC Office of Risk Management and Insurance Research Faculty Scholar in 2021. Her research interests are in the general areas of risk-based decision-making for civil infrastructures subjected to natural hazards, including climate adaptation, community resilience, life-cycle analysis, probabilistic hazard impact simulations for buildings and other infrastructure exposed to extreme events including earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, and structural safety target optimization.
In structural engineering education, social considerations, beyond life safety, have not been incorporated or highlighted within the curriculum. With ABET’s EAC Criterion 5 expansion, we see calls for increased embracement of diversity, equity, and inclusion as a profession. It is the duty of educators to convey to students that engineering decisions have broad-reaching impacts on community beyond their pure technicalities. As engineering decisions are made, elements concerning equity, such as equity of impact, should be weighed along with classic performance benchmarks. This paper introduces an infrastructure decision-making game that highlights many different aspects to be considered in risk mitigation decision-making: equity, community impact, system performance, uncertainty, and resource constraint. In this game, teams make decisions about which elements of an electric network to repair and retrofit given constraints as hazards randomly impact the community. While making the decision, the teams must weigh many different metrics and be conscious of the demographics across the community. The construction of this game proves an apt complement within classic educational structure, such as in basic structural engineering courses, where students can connect design retrofit strength levels with broader community impact. This game is applicable to students in high school and college, and also professionals, as an introductory course module for complex multi-faceted risk mitigation engineering decision-making and the role of equity considerations in it. The game design is flexible and can include other impending issues, such as climate adaptation. It also has a potential to be expanded to include other social considerations, such as diversity and inclusion. The paper presents the game development, along with results from a post-game survey demonstrating the effectiveness of the game.
Beck, A. L., & Cha, E. J. (2023, June), Board 44: Work-In-Progress: What Goes into an Engineering Decision: An Infrastructure Decision-Making Game for Exploratory Equity Learning Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--42808
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