OPFOR: Secure Tri-Town
Target Audience: Government Audience
Company: Booz Allen Hamilton
Description: Assessing land and air equipment capabilities in an operating environment is the key to protecting areas important to an area’s security and stability. For Soldiers new to equipment capabilities, it can seem like a daunting task to remember and utilize information to make accurate decisions about capabilities, especially when the environment may change with every situation. The Secure Tri-Town game enables Soldiers to leverage skills they already know, such as map reading, and practice new skills to recognize equipment capabilities that may impact an area. Through a series of randomized scenarios based on fictitious as well as open source data, Soldiers learn how to think critically about each situation, make the best decision with the information provided on specific equipment, and see the impact of their decision-making on the mission to “Secure Tri-Town.”
Skills and Ideas Taught: The instructional strategy focuses on varied practice, in which learners are presented with a variety of examples to learn equipment capabilities in the context of different operational contexts. The game gives learners the opportunity for practice and productive failure (learning from mistakes).
• Recall map reading skills and symbol recognition from prior training.
• Recognize types of areas that are important to the security and stability of the fictitious Tri-Town.
• Define the range capability of equipment, whether land or air.
• Identify the equipment that impact important areas based on the given scenario information.
Goal: The player needs to effectively maintain a steady fuel supply to each military base to support the mission and prevent the supply in any given location from reach 0. The player will also need to use critical decision making to deal with unexpected obstructing events preventing fuel flow. The progression and pace of the game will be in the control of the player utilizing the Day Cycle System. The player will make the decision when they want to progress to the next day. Each day will introduce new randomized challenges for the player to overcome. The actions the user can do per day is limited by the number of Action Points they can use, which simulates the level of effort (IE cost, time, and logistical effort) needed to perform an action.
Assessment Approach: The game measures a Soldier’s ability to consistently make accurate decisions about equipment capability in order to maintain Tri-Town’s security status of “Safe”. The learners skills are measured at the scenario-level–the ability to identify the correct equipment capability for the scenario, and then at the “mission” level–the ability to maintain the town’s security level over multiple decisions.
Game Engine: HTML5
Operating Systems: Windows 11
Primary Audience: Soldiers, 18-22 years old.