Modern simulation environments provide powerful practice opportunities for warfighters. Current approaches to scenario definition in these environments specify terrain, platforms, and major planned events, but link only indirectly to training goals. To move these environments from effective practice to effective training, they must incorporate pedagogical knowledge such as training objectives, performance measures, and trainee feedback. We have been working on an approach that provides guidance for scenario design, execution, and review. The approach views scenarios as collections of potentially overlapping learning episodes structured by a construct called the experience—a specific scenario-based situation that will give trainees an opportunity to make progress towards their training objectives.

The conditions that will bring about a particular experience are expressed as constraints. In practice, these are straight-forward statements of conditions in the scenario that must be true in order for the learning episode to take place. For example, in order for a helicopter pilot to work on a training objective in sensor fusion, multiple sensors must be enabled in the helicopter, the targets of interest must be within their range, and it must not be raining. Normally, this is accomplished during scenario planning by placing an event on a Master Scenario Events List (MSEL) that calls for relevant platforms to be in specified places at specified times. But those specifics are often unnecessary from a training perspective. Relaxing them—while enforcing the experience-based constraints-provides the possibility of additional learning opportunities when the scenario does not unfold exactly as expected.

The resulting scenario provides trainees with an environment that lets them make progress more reliably against their training objectives, and this results in more effective training. This paper explains the approach and illustrates its use in a military scenario-based training environment.