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

Community resilience focuses on the socioeconomic impact of structural failures post-disaster, emphasizing the need for equitable risk management. Achieving resilience requires well-functioning community components, bringing equity to the forefront of resilience education. Despite its importance, undergraduate structural engineering programs often provide minimal exposure to disaster social impact and equity topics. Integrating these concepts into undergraduate curricula is challenging due to their complexity, relying on advanced subjects like multi-criteria decision-making, systems analysis, and risk analysis. As most structural engineers enter the workforce with undergraduate degrees, introducing these topics early is essential. To address this gap, an active learning approach was adopted through an infrastructure decision-making game that highlights key aspects of risk mitigation: equity, community impact, system performance, uncertainty, and resource constraints. In the game, teams decide which elements (e.g., poles and substations) of an electric network to repair or retrofit under constraints while managing random hazards. Two board game versions were developed: one with a voting feature and one without. This paper introduces a computer-based version derived from the board game version without the voting feature. The digital format simplifies integration into large classes, automates scoring, and allows broader dissemination at lower cost and time. The computer version also enables more efficient data collection for assessment purposes. Tested in an undergraduate structural engineering course, the computer game’s effectiveness was evaluated through pre-and post-game assessments, observation, assignment, and log data analysis. The game demonstrated its ability to achieve key learning objectives related to resilience and equity-based decision-making.