Instructional System for Enhancing Seakeeping Cognitive Readiness and Decision-Making Skills

Planing hull craft used for high-speed operations in littoral waters pose numerous safety challenges. Failure to adequately negotiate wave conditions may result in injury to the crew and damage to the craft. Our primary goal for this project is to designa comprehensive instructional system that will materially improve boat-handling safety by teaching strategies that can significantly mitigate shock as the boat is driven through challenging wave conditions. A secondary goal is to demonstrate how innovativelearning environments and strategies can establish robust levels of skill as they compress learning time. Within Phase I of this project we developed a training module that is directed at teaching important skills for high-speed maneuvering throughmoderate to heavy wave conditions. In Phase II we plan to extend the coverage of our instructional material so that it provides a comprehensive introduction to the development of Seakeeping expertise. Our overall strategy includes an analysis of expertperformance to assess which areas of skill could benefit substantially from targeted instruction. This analysis enables us to define principles of Seakeeping from which we can then develop training strategies. We have illustrated our approach through aconceptual prototype of a training system that speaks directly to a small set of critical Seakeeping skills. The outcome of this program of development will be a comprehensive training system that is specifically tuned to the critical knowledge, skills,and abilities that underlie expert seakeeping. This training system will have a positive impact on performance and safety. There is a broad market for a training tool that effectively promotes boating safety. Such a system will be valuable not only to themilitary, but also to the general maritime industry and boating public at large. Each year in the United States there are a large number of recreational boating accidents, a significant portion of which could be addressed by training of seakeeping skills.Since boating injuries and fatalities amount to a serious health issue, and the entire maritime industry is potentially exposed to these accidents, the interest in a training product that facilitates safety will be high.