Capacity Building on Heat Balance in Electrolysis of Aluminium

Designing games for learning in the workplace is challenging in many ways. Within the process industry, the aluminium production cells are harsh environments that are difficult to instrument and pose domain related challenges, which make effective training difficult to achieve. In particular, cognitive challenges arise due to the slow nature of the physical process that disconnects the operators' actions and causality. The complex chemical process demands a high level of understanding of the parameters and their complex interdependencies. Additional challenges are related to representing an appropriate level of detail and precision of the workplace, including integration with existing tools. This paper describes the digital simulation game designed and developed for the operators in aluminium plants to master the cognitive skills required for Heat Balance in the aluminium production cells. A co-design process was adopted from the initial inception of the idea, development and evaluation. The paper will discuss and present the co-creation artefacts used, namely a paper prototype, hybrid prototype of the game along with the output from iterative development cycles. This work is conducted within the research and innovation project, Accelerated Learning for Technology Transfer, with the Norwegian company Hydro.