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.
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