Next-Generation of Maintenance Skills Training System

Todays Navy electronics maintenance training largely focuses on proceduralization of diagnosis and repair, rather than deep systems knowledge. This training is effective at producing durable skills for common systems, but brittle, especially for dealing with unique characteristics and properties of actual shipboard systems. With continuing modernization of equipment and growing unavailability of skilled maintainers, the Navys challenge is to both deepen the knowledge and skills of apprentice technicians and accelerate troubleshooting training. Soar Technology and its team proposes that key to meeting this challenge is to situate and tailor training. Embedding training in an engaging, interactive instructional environment and tailoring it to specific student competencies can reduce training time while enhancing motivation and improving transfer. The SoarTech team will address five objectives: (1) Define operational needs to ground the design and implementation on specific Navy maintenance systems training demands; (2) identify novel instructional strategies and leverage state-of-the-art game technology; (3) prioritize instruction and tailoring using generalized troubleshooting training with targeted assessment; (4) design an integrated software architecture that provides a realistic practice environment, targeted instruction and practice, fine-grained assessment, and instrumentation of student performance; and (5) research acquisition and decay models to enable longitudinal modeling tracking of students skill development.