2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

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.