(54d) Understanding Engineering Students' Approaches to Process Safety Judgements through a Digital Process Safety Game

Chemical engineers have a key responsibility in mitigating process safety incidents. When they occur, these incidents can have severe consequences (e.g., health and safety impacts on personnel or community) and are often the end result of a series of process safety judgements. To better prepare engineering students for the responsibility of preventing process safety incidents, chemical engineering programs have implemented a variety of educational strategies such as requiring process safety courses as part of the curriculum or including process safety concepts in engineering design courses. In most cases this instruction has been limited to focusing on safety and hazard mitigation and does not include how to approach making process safety judgements which are also a critical component to incident prevention.

Game-based learning has emerged as a way to simulate judgement-making scenarios for students in contexts they cannot authentically explore in a classroom. In this work, we use Contents Under Pressure (CUP), a digital process safety game, where the player assumes the role of a chemical plant manager and makes a series of process safety judgements over the course of 15 in-game days. Ongoing research with this tool has been focused on exploring the differences between engineering students beliefs and simulated behavior when making judgements. Research has indicated that if our beliefs and behaviors are not in alignment that poor judgement can surface as a result. Our data collection methodology provides us with the opportunity to collect students' beliefs (pre-CUP interview), simulated behaviors (CUP), and reflection (post-CUP survey) to directly compare student perceptions of how they approach process safety judgements in an easy-to-view format.

We observed that in some cases, students' beliefs and simulated behaviors were not in alignment, indicating that students’ beliefs may not accurately predict their future behaviors. Often, students drew on past experiences to articulate their beliefs, suggesting that they were engaging in self-reflection of their past behaviors to inform future beliefs. However, many students did not have relevant experience in a chemical plant setting, so not all experiences were completely transferable. We believe that CUP provides a simulated experience with making process safety judgements that will allow students to practice making process safety judgements and aid with forming their beliefs. Thus, we want to share our approach for comparing students' beliefs and behaviors as a classroom-based learning tool.

We have developed two potential approaches for the integration of our approach into chemical engineering classrooms. The first approach focuses on individual reflection where the student will record their beliefs, capture their associated decisions within CUP, and complete a post-game reflection. For maximum learning benefit, students should then discuss their experiences with peers within the class after these activities. The second approach involves an instructor-led discussion on how students believe they will approach process safety judgements, followed by playing through a portion of the game as a whole class. Students are then encouraged to share what they observed as differences between beliefs that they held and their approaches to making judgements as part of the game. We believe that providing instructors with a variety of implementation options will allow them to customize the content to best fit their particular students’ needs.