Work-In-Progress: What Goes into an Engineering Decision: An Infrastructure Decision-Making Game for Exploratory Equity Learning (Phase 2 Multiple Stakeholders)

Abigail Louise Beck; Eun Jeong Cha; Luc Paquette; Eric G Shaffer

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Civil Engineering Division (CIVIL) Technical Session - Effective Teaching 1
Tagged Division: Civil Engineering Division (CIVIL)
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/48554

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Paper Authors

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Abigail Louise Beck University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Abigail Beck is a Ph.D. Candidate in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received her M.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and her B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research surrounds equity-based infrastructure decision support by integrating her fundamental specialization in structural reliability, risk assessment, systems modeling, and probabilistic methods with social science approaches. She is a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a 2023-2024 Mavis Future Faculty Fellow. She is a member of the NIST Center of Excellence for Community Resilience and collaborates with engineers, economists, social scientists, and planners on the development of tools to support community resilience decision-making. She has been recognized for her research at multiple international conferences with a Student Best Paper Award at ICOSSAR 2021/2022 and CERRA Student Recognition Award at ICASP 2023.

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Eun Jeong Cha University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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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.

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Luc Paquette University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Eric G Shaffer University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Eric Shaffer is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He teaches a revolving set of courses including Virtual Reality, Computer Graphics, and Scientific Visualization. In addition to teaching, he has done research in the

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Abstract

Community resilience emphasizes the socioeconomic impact of structural failures post-disaster. This holistic view of structural risk has been driving studies for structural risk management. Since overall community resilience is achieved by the well-functioning of all community components, the concept of equity has gained attention in community resilience research. Key to community resilience and equity education is the emphasis on the multi-faceted impacts of engineering decisions and systems thinking. However, the current structural engineering curriculum at the authors’ university offers students only minimal opportunities for learning about the topics of disaster social impact and equity in their education.

Despite the importance of incorporating community resilience and equity concepts into the curriculum, it is not a trivial task due to the concepts’ complexity. These concepts are defined based on other complex subjects, such as multi-criteria decision-making, systems analysis, risk analysis, and socioeconomic disaster impact analysis. It is one of the reasons why these concepts are often taught in more advanced graduate-level courses, if at all, instead of undergraduate courses. However, introducing these concepts early on is crucial, since the vast majority of practicing structural engineers start their careers after their undergraduate program. To address these issues, we adopt an active learning approach and introduce 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 constraints. 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.

This paper introduces a new version of an infrastructure decision-making game which extends the original game to emphasize the role of the multiple criteria in decision making by introducing multiple stakeholder roles. Each student plays a stakeholder role and champions his/her metric while the team collaboratively tries to achieve overall community resilience. This game is developed as part of an instructional module that aims to be implemented into undergraduate structural engineering courses, where students can connect retrofit strength levels with broader community impact. The paper presents the game development, along with results from a post-game survey, collected during a pilot implementation, demonstrating the effectiveness and improvement of the new version of the game in achieving intended learning objectives.

Citation
Format

Beck, A. L., & Cha, E. J., & Paquette, L., & Shaffer, E. G. (2024, June), Work-In-Progress: What Goes into an Engineering Decision: An Infrastructure Decision-Making Game for Exploratory Equity Learning (Phase 2 Multiple Stakeholders) Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/48554

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Community resilience emphasizes the socioeconomic impact of structural failures post-disaster. This holistic view of structural risk has been driving studies for structural risk management. Since overall community resilience is achieved by the well-functioning of all community components, the concept of equity has gained attention in community resilience research. Key to community resilience and equity education is the emphasis on the multi-faceted impacts of engineering decisions and systems thinking. However, the current structural engineering curriculum at the authors’ university offers students only minimal opportunities for learning about the topics of disaster social impact and equity in their education. 

Despite the importance of incorporating community resilience and equity concepts into the curriculum, it is not a trivial task due to the concepts’ complexity. These concepts are defined based on other complex subjects, such as multi-criteria decision-making, systems analysis, risk analysis, and socioeconomic disaster impact analysis. It is one of the reasons why these concepts are often taught in more advanced graduate-level courses, if at all, instead of undergraduate courses. However, introducing these concepts early on is crucial, since the vast majority of practicing structural engineers start their careers after their undergraduate program. To address these issues, we adopt an active learning approach and introduce 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 constraints. 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. 

This paper introduces a new version of an infrastructure decision-making game which extends the original game to emphasize the role of the multiple criteria in decision making by introducing multiple stakeholder roles. Each student plays a stakeholder role and champions his/her metric while the team collaboratively tries to achieve overall community resilience. This game is developed as part of an instructional module that aims to be implemented into undergraduate structural engineering courses, where students can connect retrofit strength levels with broader community impact. The paper presents the game development, along with results from a post-game survey, collected during a pilot implementation, demonstrating the effectiveness and improvement of the new version of the game in achieving intended learning objectives. 
AU  - Abigail Louise Beck
AU  - Eun Jeong Cha
AU  - Luc Paquette
AU  - Eric G Shaffer
CY  - Portland, Oregon
DA  - 2024/06/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Work-In-Progress: What Goes into an Engineering Decision: An Infrastructure Decision-Making Game for Exploratory Equity Learning (Phase 2 Multiple Stakeholders)
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/48554
ER  -