games and smaller pieces
An emergency dispatch workshop, a decisions game, and microteaching plans built for different audiences
I build games because a model students have played is a model they argue with. Each of these is written so that another instructor can run it without me.
Emergency dispatch
A two-hour workshop on ambulance dispatch and location, built for high school students working in groups of five. Five stations in rotation, then a final challenge. Teams place stations, compute what share of a city of 500,000 they cover, and then get hit with a rush hour they have to adapt to.
The learning objectives are the ones I care about across every course I teach. How a real problem becomes a decision model, what a feasible solution looks like, what constraints and randomness do to an outcome, and the difference between an optimal answer and a good enough one.
- Activity plan, the full two hours with timings and facilitator notes
- Student recording sheets
Family decisions
A scheduling game. Students divide a day of activities between two parents in the Pickleshaw family, with fixed commitments, flexible tasks, activities that have to happen in sequence, and wants competing against needs. The score is Family Harmony, Stress Levels, and Schedule Conflicts, and students play it in a browser and watch the three move against each other.
It is scheduling optimization, and it is the version of it that everyone in the room has already lived. Students who would stall on a machine-shop scheduling problem argue confidently about who is picking up whom.
Operations research in the real world
A session built around the Northeast Unity Foundation, an organization allocating limited funding across shelter beds, legal advocacy, therapy, childcare, and a hotline that has to run around the clock. Prevention competes with crisis intervention for the same dollars.
The three objectives are the ones I keep returning to. Identify at least one unintended consequence of your modeling choices, identify the trade-offs between the strategies, and offer at least one alternative way to model it. The setting comes from my own research, where the agencies really do have to choose.
Microteaching plans
Four short teaching plans, each designed for a different audience, and the audience is the point. Senior supply chain engineers who have the classical tools and no time to update them. Logistics project managers who know the tools and rarely implement them. Junior researchers in a start-up who want optimization and machine learning and have not yet been made to justify a modelling choice. Each plan names who the learners are, what they want, and the specific misconception I expect to have to address.
The design of experiments game has its own page, because it is the one people remember: The Destruction of Reality Itself.