Emergency!
We have a new app on edutool.org - a queuing game about managing an emergency room:
Emergency! Game
This app is a collaboration with Craig Froehle (https://www.business.uc.edu/faculty-research/obais/faculty/craig-froehle.html). I am so happy that I got to work with him; we overlapped in the PhD program at UNC, and have the same advisor. Craig has done amazing work in his career in service operations, and this particular game is based on his board game (https://www.happyharpygames.com/p/emergency.html). This was a fun and productive collaboration.
This is my first service/healthcare operations app. I used it in my class this Spring to introduce students to queuing, and it worked amazingly well. Students loved it. The game has two stages - staffing and sequencing. During the staffing stage, players must decide how to allocate a limited budget among high-, medium-, and low-acuity rooms. During the sequencing stage, patients of high/medium/low acuity arrive in the emergency room over a 24-hour period, and players must sequence them into available rooms. This creates challenging trade-offs where players have to decide whether to leave high-acuity rooms empty in case patients arrive who need them, even as the emergency room queue starts to build up. My colleague Bob Batt has been using the board game version of this game in his service operations class for a while, and it has changed how he teaches the whole class. (Bob is an educator of the highest caliber; his classes are amazing learning experiences for our students at UW). My students commented that the experience gave them a completely different perspective on service operations; I don't think I will ever teach queuing without it now. Please check it out by requesting an account. If you want to get a more in-depth overview of the game, Craig has prepared an excellent player guidebook at https://craigfroehle.github.io/docs/student.html. We have a separate instructor guidebook available when you register for the game.
As always, let me know what you think and if you see any opportunities for improvement. Happy coding and teaching, have a great end of the semester. I will teach project management this Fall, and am already thinking about what games to code up over the summer.
