The United States Navy is engaged in an enterprise-wide transformation of how it trains. One key component of this transformation is the development of the Navy's Integrated Learning Environment (ILE). This initiative uses a variety of instructional development strategies to meet the diverse requirements of the Navy's workforce and assures content which is relevant, current, accurate and engaging. Where content design and development are concerned, the Navy has mandated the use of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) guidelines for all learning materials to be used within the ILE.

However, the growth in capability and flexibility of interactive simulations has led to a challenge for the Navy, regarding how to integrate the power of these interactive simulations into the ILE. The Naval Education and Training Command's (NETC) Experimentation Lab, located at the NAVAIR Training Systems Division in Orlando Florida, is experimenting with the tracking of learning objectives between a Learning Management System and a gaming/simulation engine for reporting back progress towards meeting defined training objectives. Additionally, efforts are looking at the challenge of objectively tracking training objectives in three dimensional, interactive simulations and/or serious games. In order to meet these requirements, technology needs to be developed to allow in-depth assessments of student performance against established training objectives while the simulation is running.

This paper discusses in detail the underlying technology being developed to launch, track and manage training simulations using the Delta3D game engine. It identifies the current state of technology in supporting this role, as well as supporting technologies and foreseeable challenges. Finally, it provides a detailed report of the lessons learned from this effort.