Work-In-Progress: What Goes into an Engineering Decision: An Infrastructure Decision-Making Game for Exploratory Equity Learning - Phase 3 Video Game Version Development

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

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Conference: 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Publication Date: June 22, 2025
Start Date: June 22, 2025
End Date: August 15, 2025
Conference Session: Games & Competitions for Civil Engineering Education
Tagged Division: Civil Engineering Division (CIVIL)
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Page Count: 8
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--57555
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/57555
Download Count: 12

Paper Authors

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Eun Jeong Cha University of Illinois at 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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Abigail Louise Beck University of Illinois at 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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Eric Shaffer University of Illinois

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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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Luc Paquette University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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Abstract

Community resilience emphasizes the socioeconomic impact of structural failures post-disaster, driving studies in structural risk management. Achieving overall community resilience requires the well-functioning of all community components, and this has brought the concept of equity into focus in resilience research. Central to resilience and equity education is the recognition of the multifaceted impacts of engineering decisions and systems thinking. However, at the authors’ university, the structural engineering curriculum offers students only minimal exposure to disaster social impact and equity topics.

Incorporating these concepts into the curriculum is challenging due to their complexity. They are built on other advanced subjects, such as multi-criteria decision-making, systems analysis, risk analysis, and socioeconomic disaster impact. Consequently, these topics are often reserved for graduate-level courses, if taught at all. Nevertheless, introducing them at the undergraduate level is crucial since most structural engineers begin their careers after completing their undergraduate education. To address this gap, an active learning approach was adopted by introducing an infrastructure decision-making game that highlights the key aspects of 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. Two versions of a board game were developed during phase 1 and phase 2: a single-player version and an expanded multi-player version with a voting feature.

This paper introduces a computer-based version of the infrastructure decision-making game. The initial design is based on the single-player board game from phase 1, with modifications to character settings and scoring formulas from the phase 2 multi-player version. The computer game format facilitates its integration into large, short-duration undergraduate classes by automating score calculations and game progression. Additionally, the digital format offers broader dissemination potential at lower cost and reduced time compared to the board game. The computer version also enables more efficient data collection for assessment purposes.

The game was tested in an undergraduate structural engineering course, and its effectiveness was evaluated using multiple approaches, including pre- and post-game self-assessments, assignments, and log-data analysis. The paper presents the game development process, along with assessment results that demonstrate the computer game's effectiveness in achieving six key learning objectives.

Citation
Format

Cha, E. J., & Beck, A. L., & Shaffer, E., & Paquette, L. (2025, June), Work-In-Progress: What Goes into an Engineering Decision: An Infrastructure Decision-Making Game for Exploratory Equity Learning - Phase 3 Video Game Version Development Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . 10.18260/1-2--57555

TY - CPAPER
AB - Community resilience emphasizes the socioeconomic impact of structural failures post-disaster, driving studies in structural risk management. Achieving overall community resilience requires the well-functioning of all community components, and this has brought the concept of equity into focus in resilience research. Central to resilience and equity education is the recognition of the multifaceted impacts of engineering decisions and systems thinking. However, at the authors’ university, the structural engineering curriculum offers students only minimal exposure to disaster social impact and equity topics.

Incorporating these concepts into the curriculum is challenging due to their complexity. They are built on other advanced subjects, such as multi-criteria decision-making, systems analysis, risk analysis, and socioeconomic disaster impact. Consequently, these topics are often reserved for graduate-level courses, if taught at all. Nevertheless, introducing them at the undergraduate level is crucial since most structural engineers begin their careers after completing their undergraduate education. To address this gap, an active learning approach was adopted by introducing an infrastructure decision-making game that highlights the key aspects of 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. Two versions of a board game were developed during phase 1 and phase 2: a single-player version and an expanded multi-player version with a voting feature.

This paper introduces a computer-based version of the infrastructure decision-making game. The initial design is based on the single-player board game from phase 1, with modifications to character settings and scoring formulas from the phase 2 multi-player version. The computer game format facilitates its integration into large, short-duration undergraduate classes by automating score calculations and game progression. Additionally, the digital format offers broader dissemination potential at lower cost and reduced time compared to the board game. The computer version also enables more efficient data collection for assessment purposes.

The game was tested in an undergraduate structural engineering course, and its effectiveness was evaluated using multiple approaches, including pre- and post-game self-assessments, assignments, and log-data analysis. The paper presents the game development process, along with assessment results that demonstrate the computer game&#39;s effectiveness in achieving six key learning objectives.

AU - Eun Jeong Cha
AU - Abigail Louise Beck
AU - Eric Shaffer
AU - Luc Paquette
CY - Montreal, Quebec, Canada
DA - 2025/06/22
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Work-In-Progress: What Goes into an Engineering Decision: An Infrastructure Decision-Making Game for Exploratory Equity Learning - Phase 3 Video Game Version Development
UR - https://peer.asee.org/57555
DO - 10.18260/1-2--57555
ER -