BMS Teaching Academy

The CET City game is based in a hypothetical city in an online serious game environment. The city is composed of houses, companies, and a municipality. Citizens living in houses sustain their lives via working in companies and have different lifestyles with different consumption patterns. Companies produce products or services (purchased by households) via adopting a technology that uses resources and emits wastes. The resource bank provides materials, energy, and water to companies/households while the waste bank receives material wastes, air emissions, and wastewater from companies/houses. Municipality has the role of regulation-making via imposing taxes or providing subsidies to companies/houses.

Student groups take the responsibility of one rural and one urban house, one product and one service company, and have a voting right in municipality. The teachers act as game masters and direct questions to groups in each game round, aligned with the intended learning outcomes (ILOs) of their theory courses. Questions can be a yes/no or an action question upon which groups go through a decision-making process.

According to Global Footprint Network, humanity uses all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during the entire year by end of July every year [CITATION]. Inspired from this reality, the game is implemented in a challenge-based learning (CBL) environment as the amount of available resources and the space for wastes are not sufficient for the CET City to survive the entire game. So, students are expected to take ‘sustainable and circular actions’ and keep resources in the ‘loop’. The main goal is to make sure that the resource bank and waste bank don’t bankrupt (sustainability challenge) while households and companies survive (resilience challenge) till the end of the game. The game dashboard displays dynamic graphs of 12 different sustainability indicators measuring each group’s and entire CET City’s performance. 

This interdisciplinary semi-supervised game has been running in Circular Economy Transition Minor since 2021 by participation of students from 11 different programs at UT.  

Industrial Symbiosis is a circular economy strategy and business model where traditionally disengaged industries can achieve sustainability via exchanging process wastes to substitute virgin materials, reducing waste and resource depletion. 

This game is played by students, divided into groups, each representing one company. Players are required to perform managerial activities related to Industrial Symbiosis. Two types of companies are distinguished: waste producers and receivers. These companies are expected to implement industrial symbiosis via exchanging information, negotiating for cost-sharing, and signing symbiotic business contracts. Then, waste is diverted from landfill and traditional virgin materials deplete less.

The goal of each company is to maximize the environmental and economic benefits. Two environmental and economic performance indicators are defined for each company. The environmental performance is computed as follows: for waste producers, the ratio of the amount of waste exchanged to the amount of waste produced; for waste receivers, the ratio of the amount of traditional input replaced to the amount of input required. The economic performance is computed as the ratio of the net cost savings due to symbiotic cooperation to the traditional production costs, that is, the costs the company would have paid without IS. Eventually, companies are ranked according to the numerical values of the two performance indicators, which are computed by considering all the game periods.

The industrial symbiosis game is being played by master students from multiple engineering and business administration programs since 2017 in the course of Circular Sustainable Business Development. 

To accelerate Circular Economy Transition (CET) in the built environment, integrated information systems that are capable to identify, coordinate, and evaluate Circular Economy (CE) collaborations across heterogeneous projects are in demand. A digital collaboration tool, Circularity Information Platform (CIP), is a promising solution to streamline complex information exchanges and foster symbiotic material interactions in broader circular ecosystems. The proposed CIP serves as a prototype to verify the function of integrated information-sharing among key actors. Meanwhile, it is a comprehensive educational platform to demonstrate closed-loop information sharing for (de-)construction industry. The students can play various roles ranging from construction and demolition contractors, recycling factories, to governmental bodies, aiming to establish a circular construction ecosystem. Students are expected to experience the dynamics of circular collaborations in an inter-organizational context. By performing CE under different scenarios, players obtain an insightful and intuitive understanding of the environmental and economic impact related to their actions. As a concrete instantiation of CET, the CIP contributes to purposeful CE education based on hands-on experiences.