AWARE: Anti-air Warfare Adaptive Readiness Environment
Navy SBIR FY2018.1


Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2018.1
Topic No.: N181-038
Topic Title: AWARE: Anti-air Warfare Adaptive Readiness Environment
Proposal No.: N181-038-0597
Firm: Tier 1 Performance Solutions, LLC
100 E. Rivercenter Blvd
Suite 100
Covington, Kentucky 41011
Contact: Jordan Haggit
Phone: (859) 415-1043
Web Site: http://www.tier1performance.com
Abstract: To maintain the United State Navy�?Ts dominance in the maritime environment it is imperative to continue to develop a more integrated naval battle force. This has led the Navy to invest in capabilities to enhance its distributed lethality by aggregating disparate sensor networks to create a common situational awareness, coordinated engagements, and distributed resource control. However, creating a netted fighting force represents a complex coordination among engineering, acquisitions, and research communities that requires each community to consider its own role within the overall mission objective to best support netted force concepts. This necessitates a learning environment to maintain and achieve proficiencies in netted force concepts. To satisfy this need we propose to develop AWARE: Anti-air Warfare Awareness and Readiness Environment. AWARE will be a realistic, portable learning environment that will teach the conceptual, non-intuitive value of an integrated Naval battle force in an adaptive way across a wide range of learners. Our team will develop AWARE using a scientifically-based methodology that leverages best practices from the psychology of motivation and engagement. AWARE will enable a data-driven, competency-centric learning lifecycle by analyzing user interaction data, generating performance metrics, and presenting the user�?Ts performance in a gameful simulation environment.
Benefits: Having a system that is individualized, flexible, and engaging establishes a promising foundation for teaching the conceptual, non-intuitive value of an integrated netted Naval force. The foundation for this approach will be based on the Gameful design methodology, which leverages scientific research in the psychology of motivation and engagement. Gameful design carefully applies extrinsic motivators (i.e., rewards) to behaviors that result in enhanced learning to form a powerful feedback loop between the learner and the task that enhances long-term leaning. The AWARE system will leverage gameful design and the Phase I work will lay the foundation to address three critical research questions in Phase II: (1) Can a scoring algorithm be created that quantitatively assesses proficiencies within netted force concepts, and diagnoses knowledge and skill gaps to be remediated? (2) Can gameful design principles be incorporated that increase short- and long-term engagement over existing, non-gamified training systems? (3) Does increased engagement correlate with increased and sustained performance? Further, AWARE will provide a holistic system for integrating our research in game-based systems for enhancing learning and organizational performance and competency-based adaptive learning systems. This platform has the potential to help measure the impact of game-based learning efforts across both military and commercial domains.

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