Game—Logistics to the Rescue: An Elementary Introduction to Planning in Disaster Response Decision Environments

Logistics to the Rescue is a spreadsheet K–12 game designed as a platform to familiarize students with emergency logistics. In the game, students play the role of an emergency dispatcher, assigning locations to routes. The challenge presented is threefold. Students must serve as many locations as possible within a time-frame. Midroute, an additional set of locations whose requests may be inaccurate is revealed; these requests are termed unverified demand locations. Students must balance uncertainty and time while serving as many accurate locations as possible. Finally, they are interrupted to learn whether the unverified demand locations’ requests are accurate. The game serves as a pedagogical tool for simulating a postdisaster environment and it exposes the real-time implications of social media and the data it produces. It emphasizes the importance of social and ethical awareness in the field of emergency logistics by showcasing the consequences induced by civilians’ reliance on social media in times of crisis. In doing so, it highlights the expansive boundaries of engineering’s disciplines and content. It is our hope that Logistics to the Rescue will encourage students, especially girls, to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics by providing a distinctive narrative where engineering is viewed as creative/collaborative rather than technical/a-social.