Mage Duel Serious Game - TACFI

Military linguists acquire an enormous volume of vocabulary each day either through DoD basic acquisition courses or through continuation training for DoD language professionals, and struggle for years to achieve the optimum balance of speed versus accuracy in their translation work. This leads to high attrition rates in DoD basic language courses, long ramp-up times for operational language analysts and atrophy of perishable language skills for DoD language professionals. Acquisition and retention of specialized and highly perishable language skills are critical, given world events and Human Language Technology (HLT) which have resulted in high proficiency demands on military language professionals, while the disappearance of public school and university foreign language programs inhibits DoD-wide language professional recruitment efforts. Given these critical needs, USAF and DoD language analysts require an individualized cradle-to-grave solution for vocabulary acquisition and translation proficiency. Our serious game Mage Duel will solve this critical problem aided by bleeding edge technologies. Mage Duel is a serious video game that combines language learning concepts, learning science, and HLT to autonomously accelerate vocabulary acquisition and train timely and accurate translation through adaptive individualized learning activities.