by Ronald F. Tuttle, Ph.D.

“I have an avatar.” With that opening, Maj. Gen. Erwin “Erv” Lessel III addressed the faculty, staff, and students of AFIT’s campus on 12 February 2008. Gen. Lessel’s presentation was more than just an explanation of AETC’s white paper titled “On Learning: The Future of Air Force Education and Training.” It was a call for action and an affirmation of the role distance learning (DL) is having and going to have in the future of education and training inside the Air Force. It also aligns the Air Force with a national trend.

According to a survey of 2,500 campuses by the collaborators Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, College Board, and Babson College, nearly 3.5 million college or graduate students, one of every five, took at least one online course last fall, double the figures of five years earlier. The last speed bump for real growth has been removed. Last year Congress lifted a rule that colleges must provide half of all courses in classrooms in order to qualify for federal funding.

Gen. Lessel made the observation that today’s Airmen come into the Air Force with savvy computer skills from playing video games (America’s Army), interacting with the internet (MySpace), and exploring virtual worlds (Second Life). They are members of the millennial generation and referred to as “Digital Natives.” They also come with expectations, which are growing exponentially. Those expectations have to do with communications, access to information, and education and training. Many middle and high school students are interested in online classes to supplement their learning. According to a study conducted by the nonprofit education think tank Project Tomorrow, “[t]his holds true for 47 percent of high school students and 32 percent of students in grades six to eight.” AETC’s MyBase embodies a virtual world that addresses our newest Airmen expectations and our leadership’s need to keep our Air Force #1!

In 2006, the Center for MASINT Studies and Research recognized that its award-winning Advanced Geospatial-Intelligence IR/SAR Certificate Program (ACP) needed to get to the users who, because of ops tempo, could not get to the 17-hour credit ACP. The Center recognized, as highlighted by Gen. Lessel that the young intelligence analyst’s expectations are more than just PowerPoint and a video tape for asynchronized DL, that a new approach was needed. Also, since the ACP included four practicums, the new approach had to include dynamic modeling and simulation. Finally, the approach had to work inside AFIT’s Blackboard LMS. The approach selected was to build all the practicums using the DELTA 3D gaming engine from the NPS MOVES Institute. The similarity between traditional approaches to M&S and that which occurs in advanced gaming engines has been documented. The DELTA 3D open-source gaming engine allows inclusion of physics-based M&S codes which are critical to realistic results for the DL student and instructor evaluation. For the DL ACP practicums, the approach is called Advanced Gaming Integrated into a LMS Environment (AGILE).

The first practicum selected for AGILE was the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) laboratory course that complements the DL ACP SAR lectures. The objective of the AGILE video game for the DL SAR practicum is for the student assigned to the operations center (Figure 1) to correctly task the UAV to collect the necessary SAR images (Figure 2) for two-color multiview, change detections, and ultimately, exploitation of enemy targets and activity to satisfy GEOINT and MASINT requirements as specified by the combatant commander staffs. The student is in an interactive environment (video game) which allows the student to apply the theory from the DL SAR lectures to collect the SAR images. The current version of AGILE uses a first-person avatar when the student reports to the operations center (click here to see video). Completion of the video game for the AGILE DL SAR lab is projected to be December, with testing of the video game inside the Blackboard environment to start with a select number of volunteers in January 2009. For the purpose of results-based education, AGILE includes research studies comparing the differences in academic achievement among students who did and did not use the videogame in completing the ACP. Some research has indicated that students 40 years and under scored significantly higher with game play, while students 41 and older did not. Our research hopes to advance game-base methodologies for technical disciplines that employ practicums to reinforce scientific principles and concepts for today’s “Digital Natives” coming into the Air Force.