Serious Games for Team Training

Exploration crews for long duration space flights have continually expressed a need for more chances to learn to work together as a team prior to flight. Together with the need to retain proficiency with limited places to practice, we propose to build a virtual environment that is both website-accessible and scientifically-rooted team. The resulting training system will enable crews to maintain a high state of cognitive readiness for team-based skills, such as coordinated fire suppression.

The proposed training system will provide team-specific, task-generic, and task-specific training. We expect to either complement the EMER on board trainer by adding in a real-time training portion or build a planning portion prior to execution of the training scenarios. The fire suppression training system development would occur from 2013 to 2015, parallel with Boeing's recently awarded increment from the commercial crew program to develop the CST-100. Another set of users could come from NASA's emergency personnel. The White Sands Test Facility features fire and emergency services on site.

The team training system can be used by federal, state, and local government organizations to improve team performance, especially for time-critical situations. The application area most similar to the NASA application would again be similar occupations such as firefighting, law enforcement, healthcare. Other potential applications include the military, especially for unit level teams.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 5) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.