CHI SYSTEMS INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: The widespread use of serious games for military training has been accompanied by a growin

Description

The widespread use of serious games for military training has been accompanied by a growing concern that too little attention is paid to the underlying instructional design or pedagogical theory. Even in objective-driven game design, serious games with cognitive learning objectives can lack effective, customized performance feedback. Tutoring systems, such as AutoTutor, create opportunities for learners to elaborate on answers they have given in response to a tutor"s questions, prompts for information, suggestions for actions, etc. AutoTutor for instance has an animated conversation agent and a dialog management facility that attempts to comprehend the learner's inputs and to appropriately respond. One way to incorporate performance feedback in serious games is to embed a tutoring system with similar functionality into the virtual environment. Specifically, the animated conversation agent would become an in-game character who interacts with the user. CHI Systems, a small business innovator in simulation and game-based training, proposes the Game-based Architecture for Mentor-Enhanced Training Environments (GAMETE), an instructionally sound interface architecture and modular interactive tutor-game framework for pairing games with tutoring technologies. We will demonstrate GAMETE through two initial exemplars (AutoTutor and a widely-used game engine) in a Soldier-relevant training domain, and illustrate the general applicability of this framework.