Pedagogical Authoring of Virtual Environments (PAVE)

The United States faces a persistent and real cyber threat to its government and business infrastructure. It is estimated that the .mil environment experiences 250,000 actual attack attempts every day from an assortment of hacktavists, criminal elements, and nation-states. Virtual worlds hold tremendous promise as training tools in the cyber domain. However, despite their promise as training tools, virtual worlds in and of themselves are not training tools. They require the proper design to transform them from entertainment technologies to training tools. What this suggests is the need for authoring tools for virtual worlds, rather than more or different virtual worlds per se. However, much like the virtual worlds themselves, authoring tools also are not designed with training in mind. It is with this goal in mind that we propose the development of the Pedagogical Authoring of Virtual Environments (PAVE), an authoring tool that enables non-training science experts to develop pedagogically effective user-generated content for virtual worlds.