HCC - Medium: A Location-Aware Non-Mimetic Simulation Game for Teaching Team Coordination

团队协作对于许多关键任务是必不可少的，但是教会人们一起工作是困难的。消防应急响应的团队协调要求高，实时性强，对安全保障至关重要。参与者快速获取、整合和共享大量信息，同时在危险、动态的情况下同步行动。计算机编程是另一项需要团队完成的任务，对安全和工业至关重要。数字游戏是一种令人兴奋的、全新的、内在激励的教育媒介，能够要求人际沟通和合作，并在安全的环境中模拟压力。位置感知游戏的具体基础是通过可穿戴电脑和传感器将直接的物理动作与人机交互结合起来，创造出混合现实，为人与人之间的互动提供了独特的能力。位置感知型多人游戏改变了参与者之间的互动方式，为玩家提供了自发分裂和重组的机会，这在传统的桌面数字游戏中是不可能的。本研究开发并评估了一个位置感知的非模拟模拟游戏，用于教学团队协调，该游戏基于初步发现，确定了参与者动态重新分组和优化通信方式（如面对面和无线电）在火灾应急响应中的重要性。该项目引入非拟态仿真来描述模拟情境化人类任务操作的环境，强调人类沟通和协调的结构，同时抽象出环境的物理特征。非模拟仿真将仿真资源集中在任务性能的目标导向的操作特征上，例如信息流。本提案的目标是开发新的高性能，具有成本效益的方法，使用位置感知非模仿模拟游戏来教授团队协调应急响应。此外，将调查非模拟模拟从火灾应急响应的接地民族志数据中转移到STEM学生的教学团队以协调合作项目。主要假设是调查位置感知游戏是否以及如何在危险和压力环境中提高团队协调表现，以及这种教授技能的方法是否可以转移到其他团队环境中。本研究的跨学科研究方法具有创新性，它整合了民族志、分布式和团队认知、游戏设计、位置感知系统、人机交互和应急响应等方法。这种创新的方法有望产生重大成果：(1)非模拟仿真的接地方法；(2)体现游戏如何影响教育的新知识；(3)跨领域教学团队协作的非拟态仿真游戏设计新方法；(4)关于设计和评估位置感知系统的新知识；(5)评估团队协作的新方法以及游戏如何支持团队协作。研究产品将部署在全国最大的消防训练设施中，该设施每年教育超过45,000名学生，提高应急人员的技能和表现。更有效的团队合作意味着火灾应急人员将能够更好地履行他们的职责：保护公民的生命，保护彼此的生命，保护财产。游戏是一种必不可少的文化形式。通过游戏进行教育将激发学生的参与度。在STEM入学人数不断下降的时期，在计算机科学本科专业的部署预计会增加保留率。

Team coordination is essential for many critical tasks, but teaching people to work together is difficult. Vital to safety and security, the demanding team coordination of fire emergency response is characterized by real time stresses. Participants quickly acquire, integrate, and share large amounts of information while synchronizing action in dangerous, dynamic situations. Computer programming, another demanding task performed by teams, is vital to security and industry. Digital games are an exciting, new, intrinsically motivating medium of education, capable of requiring interpersonal communication and cooperation, and simulating stress in a safe environment. The embodied basis of location-aware games, which create mixed reality by combining direct physical action with human computer interaction via wearable computers and sensors, provides unique capabilities for human-to-human interaction. Location-aware multi-player games change the way participants interact with one another, by affording players the opportunity to spontaneously split-up and re-group, which is impossible in traditional desktop digital games. This research develops and evaluates a location-aware non-mimetic simulation game for teaching team coordination based on preliminary findings that establish the importance of dynamic re-grouping of participants and optimization of communication modalities, such as face-to-face and radio, in fire emergency response. The project introduces non-mimetic simulation to describe environments that model contextualized human task operations, emphasizing the structure of human communication and coordination, while abstracting out physical characteristics of an environment. Non-mimetic simulation focuses simulation resources on goal-directed operational characteristics of task performance, such as information flows. The objective of this proposal is to develop new high performance, cost-effective methods for using location-aware non-mimetic simulation games to teach team coordination for emergency response. Further, the transfer of the non-mimetic simulation from its roots in grounded ethnographic data about fire emergency response to teaching teams of STEM students to coordinate collaborative projects will be investigated. The principal hypotheses are to investigate whether and how location-aware games can improve team coordination performance in dangerous and stressful environments, and whether this method for teaching skills will prove transferable to other teamwork contexts.The proposed research is innovative in its interdisciplinary approach, which integrates methods from ethnography, distributed and team cognition, game design, location-aware systems, human computer interaction, and emergency response. This innovative approach is expected to yield significant outcomes: (1) a grounded methodology of non-mimetic simulation; (2) new knowledge of how embodied game play impacts education; (3) new non-mimetic simulation game design methods for teaching team coordination across domains; (4) new knowledge about designing and evaluating location-aware systems; (5) new methods for evaluating team coordination and how games support it. Research products will be deployed in the nation's largest fire training facility, which educates over 45,000 students per year, improving the skills and performance of emergency responders. More effective teamwork means that fire emergency responders will be better able to perform their duties: protecting the lives of citizens, protecting each others' lives, and protecting property. Games are an essential form of culture. Delivering education through games will motivate student engagement. In a period in which STEM enrollment has been declining, deployment among undergraduate computer science majors is expected to increase retention.