Resilient futures: A game of high stakes

What is a game? It can be a form of competitive activities played according to rules, or an activity for amusement or entertainment, or structured, interactive activities that require thought and adaptation as part of challenges within a learning exercise. Learning by gaming about resilience is particularly ‘high stakes’, given our current climate of uncertainty, and exposes participants to new knowledge and skills without the risk that would otherwise be taken in the field.

Having a resilient future or resilience to a disaster can be learned from typical situations in society where the outcome of one group’s choices is critically dependent on the actions of other groups. Students often lack first-hand experience of disasters or of responding to them. Their understanding of resilience in a disaster context cannot often be learned externally from a real disaster. The ‘game’ therefore offers them that opportunity.

This project is about teaching students about resilience to disasters and about how to deal with the action of others which impact on their resilience. Games are part of all human experience from simple games learned early to complex games devised with rules. Humans are used to games in their experience and many lessons are learned throughout life as part of game playing: competing, strategy making, interacting in structured ways, making decisions and problem solving.

Many students who study disaster management don't have real life experience of disasters. In a management context, they do need experience to practice based on applicable principles learned through simulated contexts. Using practice which has been captured from disaster response and management practitioners and presented in “a system dynamics” format, scenarios can be created within which students can apply learned principles and then learn decision-making processes, in the context of disasters, about disaster response management and the consequences of the decisions they made, leading to understanding the transfer of knowledge to those affected to enable resilience in specific contexts.

The “systems dynamic” model enables multiple actors to act and react in various ways, learning from experience, building knowledge of action and its effectiveness, building principles of practice to apply in as many different disaster scenarios as they can, as effects can vary in almost every disaster event. However, to build this “systems dynamic” model requires extensive levels of knowledge. This knowledge can be captured from practitioners (disaster response and relevant agencies). This knowledge can then be modelled into the system with certain rules and algorithms which allow the system to produce (generate) results according to those rules, enabling learning and re-learning as contexts and conditions change in a ‘game’ situation.

The game played by these rules can then identify students who have demonstrated the ability to learn and adapt to rules and uncertainty which was captured from real life. The skills derived from this game of high stakes learning process will equip students to be ready for a disaster Resilient Future.

Office for Learning and Teaching Grant Success

I am delighted to announce that our group has secured a $50,000 grant from the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching to develop a concept for a disaster resilience system simulator.

The project, entitled 'Modelling disaster resilience: enhancing student learning through trans-disciplinary simulation of wicked scenarios (RES-SIM)​', will be carried out by a project team led by Dr von Meding, supported by Dr Giggins and Dr Kanjanabootra from UoN and Dr Vanessa Cooper from RMIT.

This project has already attracted some media interest, with the ABC running a story online and on local radio. 

The project team are very pleased to be able to work on this project and look forward to getting up and running in early 2015! I have included a summary below. 

Project Summary:

The RES-SIM project is a collaboration between the University of Newcastle and RMIT University that proposes to develop the conceptual model for a virtually distributed computer-based teaching and learning tool that enables students within and across disciplines (e.g. engineering, architecture, logistics), both on and off campus, to collaboratively acquire essential decision-making skills through immersion in a dynamic disaster system simulation. The concept stems from game theory, competition theory and system theory. Societal systems and subsystems (e.g. health systems, transport systems, political systems) are vulnerable to a range of destabilising variables, from the immediate impacts of disasters (natural or man-made) on various system components to the subsequent responses of decision-makers. In many fields, including disaster response, simulations generally rely upon face-to-face, resource intensive scenarios or involve ‘event-based’ simulations, which fail to fully engage the systems of society that are impacted by shocks and hazards. Students are emerging from higher education with theoretical knowledge of complex systems but little in the way of tangible experience. Phase 2 of the RES-SIM project (beyond the scope of this project) will create a simulation tool that recognises these dynamics, while allowing the ‘game’ controller the flexibility to manipulate the conditions during the simulation itself to mimic the chaotic nature of disaster scenarios. This will create an environment that yields rich participatory experiences for students and embedded conceptual learning.