2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Traditional geotechnical engineering education have difficulties for students to connect among theoretical concepts, laboratory testing, field investigation and engineering design due to the limitation of temporal and spatial resources. Developing an educational game could provide an integrated geotechnical engineering education for students to systematically comprehend the process of a design for a geotechnical project from theories, experiments, to practical designs.
To achieve this educational goal, this paper presents an ongoing development of an educational game to propose an integrated geotechnical engineering education method by using multiphysics enriched mixed reality. The game is developed based on a design of geothermal piles which represents an innovative and sustainable geotechnical solution to the global climate change issue. The virtual reality is applied to visualize the field environments (e.g., geomaterials, ground conditions, and sampling), laboratory conditions (e.g., technician, testing devices, and tools), and design components for structural simulation (i.e., finite element software). The gameplay is story-based and task-driven for engaging students with geotechnical concepts in a pleasant way. Several mini-games have been designed to provide background information and encourage students to play this game. This game includes soil sampling on the field, measuring thermomechanical properties of soils in the laboratory, and structural design and numerical simulation of a geothermal pile based on finite element method (FEM). Students will be led to use thermal conductivity meter and direct shear device to obtain thermal conductivity and shear parameters for the collected soil samples and apply the associated properties to structural design of geothermal piles. This newly developed educational game allows geotechnical engineering instructors to expose students to more laboratory testing and field environment. The geotechnical engineering education could be enhanced by visualizing the inherent cohesion among theoretical concepts, laboratory testing, field investigation and engineering design through multiphysics enriched mixed reality gaming.