Learning doesn’t have to be boring. There’s a lot of research these days around how to use serious games and simulations to train. Widespread adoption is still a ways away, but there is some really cool stuff out there already. In research projects funded by the Joint ADL Co-lab, we’ve been working with Forterra Systems and Aptima to advance this promising technology.

Forterra recently published a demonstration of our work on YouTube. This video shows the blending of their Olive platform for immersive simulation with traditional online training delivered via the SCORM Engine, check it out:

The work we did with Aptima doesn’t look as cool, but it was pretty interesting nevertheless. In that project we figured out how to use SCORM 2004 Sequencing and Navigation (an inherently individual paradigm) to determine the optimal training scenario for a team training jointly in an Olive-based simulation. The paper documenting the findings was published at I/ITSEC last year.

Mike is the Founder and was President of Rustici Software until 2016. Most recently he was the CEO of Watershed Systems. He helped guide the first draft of the Tin Can API (xAPI) and believes ice cream is the "elixir of life."