Situated cognitive engineering: the requirements and design of automatically directed scenario-based training

Serious games enable trainees to practice independently of school, staff, and fellow students. This is important as amount of practice directly relates to training efficacy. It is also known that personalized guidance elevates the benefits of training. How to achieve automated guidance, for example to be used in serious games, is a yet unsolved issue. This paper uses the situated Cognitive Engineering method to analyze the operational demands, theoretical foundations and technological opportunities for the design of an automatically directed scenario-based training system (AD-SBT). AD-SBT guides training by selecting scenarios that match the trainee’s competency level, by monitoring the training process, and by offering appropriate support. Three instructional principles are used: adapt training to the trainee’s cognitive characteristics, strengthen the trainee’s will to learn, and foster transfer of learned skills. This paper reports evidence taken from the literature and by means of a use case simulation to validate and verify the presented requirements for AD-SBT and the underlying claims. Results show that the introduced requirements baseline and the resulting design for AD-SBT form a good starting point for future refinement and prototyping.