Best Practices for the Design and Use of a Serious Game to Conduct Dynamic Target Cell Training

摘要

In today's fast-paced, dynamic environment, there is an urgent need for to identify, track, and attack the combatant commanders' high pay-of targets as quickly as possible. To respond to this requirement, the USAF created the Dynamic Targeting Cell (DTC) within the Air Operations Center (AOC) and created a process called Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, and Assess (F2T2EA). Unfortunately, these steps alone are not able to adequately address the problem. Ultimately, the success or failure of military operations, of any kind, are limited by the cognitive and team skills of the organization prosecuting the mission. For something as complex as dynamic targeting, participants must be have superior skills in quickly visualizing friendly versus enemy capabilities with respect to time, space, distance, terrain, and weather. They must also thoroughly understand not only their role within the process, but the roles of all team members including those that are not routine participants. Moreover, the time sensitive nature of the process creates additional pressure and further stresses the system. Unfortunately, previous DTC training opportunities were limited to large-scale exercises or on-the-job training during combat operations. Recently, MAK technologies in conjunction with AFRL-Mesa, created a PC-based training solution specifically designed to provide high quality, low-overhead individual cognitive skills and team training for F2T2EA by the DTC. To insure maximum effectiveness, we identified and continually focused on the target audience, training objectives and performance measures, and the training environment as we designed and developed the final training solution. This highly focused approach enabled us to quickly identify the optimal instructional strategy and then create an effective PC-based simulation to support the selected strategy. As a result of our effort, we discovered numerous best practices for developing Serious Gaming solutions for military training.