Developing a Taxonomy of Characteristics and Features of Learning Systems and Internet Gaming Environments

Abstract

There is currently a substantial amount of interest in the exploitation of online interactive gaming environments for training across a number of applied domains including military operations (e.g., the DARPA DARWARS program; US Army Future Combat Systems training program). However, there are no standardized guidelines or specifications related to what the key characteristics of a learning environment must posses and what features of current online gaming environments could facilitate efficiently modifying them to be training and learning environments. This project involved a review of the extant literatures in learning environments and in gaming environment development and application to develop a taxonomy of the key characteristics of instructional environments and the manner in which these characteristics map to existing Internet game architectures. The project deliverables included a review of the pertinent literatures and the development of a research-driven taxonomy of characteristics and the definition of a process whereby a candidate gaming environment could be modified to function as a distributed training environment for a military application. Potential future work in the area is discussed in terms of using the taxonomy to aid in the development of an authoring system for adding instructional components to games as well as the development of a synthetic task gaming environment for military and academic experimentation.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADA462795

Entities

People

  • Jinsheng Xu

Organizations

  • North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Army Personnel
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Simulations
  • Computers
  • Doctrine
  • Education
  • Educational Technology
  • Instructors
  • Military Operations
  • Psychology
  • Simulations
  • Students
  • Trainees
  • Training
  • Virtual Reality

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Instructional Design and Training Evaluation.