ESD Games
Welcome to ESD Games! We have created several educational games for use in our courses within the Engineering Systems and Design (ESD) pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). If you are an ESD student, you have likely been sent to this page by your instructor. Choose the link below for the game appropriate for your class.
Even if you are not an SUTD student you are welcome to try out the games. Each game has a tutorial or presentation which explains it so be sure to start with that.
Professor, Former Head of Pillar for ESD (2016-2022), Distinguished Visiting Professor for ASI
Peter Jackson
Choice, Chance, and Consequence
Game Synopsis: The ‘Who Am I’ game helps you to perceive probabilities in terms of sets of features: The “chance” is a randomly-drawn mystery card with the identity of one of the characters hidden. The “choices” are what questions you ask to eliminate characters from consideration, based on their features. By a process of elimination you can identify the mystery character. The “consequences” are the number of questions it takes for you to identify the character. This is your score. You can be lucky or unlucky but, if you play multiple times, it is your skill at choosing the right questions that determines how well you do in the long run. See how computing conditional probabilities pays off. You can choose to play the basic or conditional game. The game can be played in Firefox or Chrome.
- Tutorial
- Play basic: This version helps you to visualize probabilities.
- Play conditional: This version is used to teach ‘Conditional Probabilities’
Design an Amusement Park
Game Synopsis: Design, analyze and optimize your own amusement park. It looks simple: just drag and drop attractions onto a design layout of the park. But there are complexities: you need to please three different groups of consumers (families, teens, and seniors). You can grow your ticket sales but be careful: queues for the attractions can grow rapidly and ruin the experience for all. Finding a good balance for your objectives is an important part of any design. In lecture or a workshop we will explain the tools used in constructing the game: consumer choice models, queueing network models, and feedback control.
The Hospital Patient Flow Game
Game Synopsis: The Hospital Patient Flow Game is a flow analysis game in which you must pick up patients and move them through a hospital from one treatment area to the next until they are finally discharged. Whoever moves the required number of patients through the hospital fastest wins. It sounds simple but it is a fast-paced game and there are tricks to saving time. But it is also an educational game: you will learn a fundamental concept of analysing flow in engineering systems: the so-called “Little’s Law.” So come take a first step into engineering systems analysis and have fun doing it.
Contact: Peter Jackson (peter_jackson@sutd.edu.sg)