Cooking a dinner, heating a house, lighting a street, and running a factory - all of these need power. Energy is thus at the heart of everybody’s quality of life. How to generate and use energy that satisfies increasing energy needs while combating climate changes at the same time becomes an unprecedented challenge for a sustainable city development. Bringing such real science and engineering design problem as well as involved societal and environmental issues into the Principles of Engineering course is the core of this game. The goal of the Power Ville VR game is to educate students about four energy choices (coal, wind, solar, and nuclear) and the impact of those choices on the environment of the city. To implement this goal, the game incorporated the CI tools, which are gaming, simulation and networking, and the three metacognitive interventions.
This game opens with the player introduced to the Mayor of the city asking the player to become a consulting engineer to analyze the energy consumption of the city with a given city budget and energy demands. The player then visits various facility buildings (each with identifiable and unique landmarks) and talks to individual power system experts for pros and cons on each of the four energy source choices. Success is measured by the player's ability to apply power and energy system knowledge from both the classroom and game. The game is designed such that a final report is automatically composed upon completion using the choices made by the player in each game stage. Throughout the game, players can utilize tools in the game menu such as Road Map to see what they should do next and KWS where notes will be recorded from each new character encounter. Players can also utilize other CI tools, Simulator and Optimization Programming, once all power system experts have been visited. Simulator allows the player to input demand for the four power sources and other source-dependent contraints and outputs the total amount of CO2 emissions and total environmental impact of the power source. The Optimization Programming tool takes inputs such as data collected through the game and the player's preliminary ranking of the power sources and outputs an evaluation that uses a pre-programmed scoring method to assess the quality of the decision.