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Game-based learning is an effective tool for motivating engineering students to engage with difficult and often complex topics. Although some research has been conducted on how games elicit motivation, additional studies have been suggested. The proposed work leverages Keller’s ARCS-V theory to investigate how desire for a specific outcome within the process safety digital game Contents Under Pressure affects students’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their experience. It was observed that students play the game with a desire either to improve themselves for internal satisfaction or to reach a set external objective in terms of academic or career performance. Many students also played the game with the goal to achieve key outcomes as it relates to game-based metrics. Students expressed a mixture of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the outcome obtained. Those who were satisfied were most often exhibiting behaviors of paragaming or were experiencing immersion in the game, whereas those students that showed dissatisfaction often blamed the game while expressing difficulties with achieving a positive outcome. 

Game-based learning is an effective tool for motivating engineering students to engage with difficult and often complex topics. Although some research has been conducted on how games elicit motivation, additional studies have been suggested. The proposed work leverages Keller’s ARCS-V theory to investigate how desire for a specific outcome within the process safety digital game Contents Under Pressure affects students’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their experience. It was observed that students play the game with a desire either to improve themselves for internal satisfaction or to reach a set external objective in terms of academic or career performance. Many students also played the game with the goal to achieve key outcomes as it relates to game-based metrics. Students expressed a mixture of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the outcome obtained. Those who were satisfied were most often exhibiting behaviors of paragaming or were experiencing immersion in the game, whereas those students that showed dissatisfaction often blamed the game while expressing difficulties with achieving a positive outcome. 

Every year new safety features and regulations are employed within the process industry to reduce risks associated with operations. Despite these advancements chemical plants remain hazardous places, and the role of the engineer will always involve risk mitigation through real time decision making. Results from a previous study by Kongsvik et al., 2015 indicated that there were three types of decisions in major chemical plants: strategic decisions, operational decisions, and instantaneous decisions. The study showed the importance for improving upon engineers’ operational and instantaneous choices when tasked with quick solutions in the workforce. In this research study, we dive deeper to understand how senior chemical engineering students’ prioritize components of decision making such as budget, productivity, relationships, safety, and time, and how this prioritization may change as a result of participation in a digital immersive training environment called Contents Under Pressure. More specifically, we seek to address the following two research questions: (1) How do senior chemical engineering students prioritize safety in comparison to criteria such as budget, personal relationships, plant productivity, and time in a process safety context, and (2) How does senior chemical engineering students’ prioritization of decision making criteria (budget, personal relationships, plant productivity, safety, and time) change after exposure to a virtual process safety decision making environment? As part of this study, 187 senior chemical engineering students from three separate institutions completed a pre- and post-reflection survey around their engagement with Contents Under Pressure and asked them to rank their prioritizations of budget, productivity, relationships, safety, and time. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, and Friedman and Wilcoxon-sign-rank post hoc analyses were completed to determine any statistical differences between the rankings of decision making factors before and after engagement with Contents Under Pressure. Simulating process safety decision making with interactive educational supports may increase students’ understanding of genuine workplace environments and factors that contribute to process safety, without the real world hazards that result from poor decision making. By understanding how students prioritize these factors, chemical engineering curricula can be adapted to focus on the areas of process safety decision making where students need the largest improvement, thereby better preparing them to enter the engineering workforce. 

This paper provides an overview of the general process and types of informal reasoning that undergraduate chemical engineering students use when approaching hypothetical process safety decisions. 

Process safety incidents, ranging from the relatively minor to the catastrophic, are a major concern in the chemical engineering profession with impacts including lost time incidents, serious personal injury, fatalities, and negative public perception. These events can also have significant impacts on the environment and local infrastructure. However, many of these incidents could be avoided if better process safety management or risk mitigation was employed. For example, the fire and explosion that occurred at ExxonMobil in Baton Rouge was the result of operators manually opening a gearbox due to lack of familiarity with the equipment. This incident could have been avoided if better maintenance or training procedures had been in place, if the operators had recognized the old valve had a different design than the new ones, or if the old valves had been switched to a newer valve design. This accident indicates how process safety incidents can occur due to a series of decisions.