Congratulations to Martin Haberman and the President, Delia Stafford-Johnson of the Haberman Foundation. This technology may well change the way classroom management training is provide to our educators and has many business application.
Associated Press
ORLANDO -- Teetering on the edge of chaos, the urban middle-school class had the ingredients of a scholastic concoction ready to boil over.
The barely audible, shy, brooding girl. The loud boy throwing spitballs at the teacher's pet. The kid hunched over in his seat, oozing apathy, wanting to be anywhere else. Different personality types, races and genders, laughing mockingly and making inappropriate sounds -- there's no pretense of civility or respect for elders.
Gaining control and coaxing the class to write an essay about what they did last weekend requires a special set of skills. Fortunately for the rookie teacher, this class was only a computer simulation.
The children are a mix of virtual humans on a projector screen and an out-of-sight actress playing the gestures and dialogue of each student as she speaks with the teacher-in-training.
It's part of an expansion of computer simulators beyond military and aviation applications into professions such as teaching, policing, sales and other fields that depend more on interpersonal skills than technical proficiency. The simulator industry is anchored in central Florida, where there are more than 100 companies employing 17,000 people and doing $2.2 billion in contracting annually.
Randall Shumaker, director of the University of Central Florida's Institute for Simulation & Training, said simulators could give realistic but safe training to teachers, whose mistakes can be traumatizing, or suicide prevention counselors, where an error can be fatal. These new applications, experts said, are potentially enormous, especially with a gaming generation that has grown up playing computer games.
Perhaps it's an ironic trend: While many lament that people are losing their face-to-face social skills because of cell phones, e-mail and text-messaging, some may receive computer training on how to interact with other humans in the most delicate situations.
"The dropout rate for urban teachers is 40 or 50 percent," Shumaker said. "Part of the reason appears to be they just get thrown into the fires. We can build systems that give people a graded approach so you expose them to this in a virtual world and gradually turn up the heat. So when they see it for the first time, it's not so shocking and they have strategies that work."
The STAR Classroom Simulator, a partnership between Simiosys LLC, the Haberman Educational Foundation and UCF, mixes computer technology and a human role-player. It's currently in trial and is expected to be commercially available within a year.
"I thought it was a great device to see how you would respond in a spontaneous situation with a student that might be either aggressive or have some repressive tendencies," said Kevin Gouvia, a former teacher at an Orlando-area urban high school who recently tried the simulator. "One thing that many young people going into the field don't realize is in addition to being an expert in your field, you also have to be an expert in dealing with a variety of human beings."
Other companies have combined engineers, psychologists, writers and subject-matter experts to create a training tool for use on a personal computer.
SIMmersion LLC, a Columbia, Md., company partially owned by Johns Hopkins University, has developed interrogation simulations for the FBI by filming actors giving different responses, including gestures, to a range of potential questions that an agent might ask. The footage is then built into a computer program that responds logically to a list of guideline questions typed or spoken by the trainee.
In one, "Rasheed" is a potential informant whom agents must cultivate by demonstrating sensitivity to Arab culture.
Being too abrupt with Rasheed, or telling him that his wife is beautiful, will offend him, and his demeanor will change. Sometimes Rasheed is open, sometimes not, and his motives for talking differ, meaning the same conversation will never occur twice, said Dale Olsen, SIMmersion's president. The system teaches rapport-building with the subject, rewarding a sensitive approach and punishing blunders.
Still, Rasheed is limited -- he can't talk about every subject because that technology is several years, maybe decades, away, experts said.
Social simulators chase an elusive goal of replicating human behavior.
"We don't quite understand all the things we need to know and we can't quite make the (virtual humans) advanced enough," Shumaker said.
But the advantage comes from providing a safe environment that can be used any time and is a cost-cutting alternative to hiring multiple actors.
"You can't necessarily practice dealing with real people because if you do you will harm people," Olsen said. "People could die or you could get sued."
SIMmersion has developed a program to help Army chaplains identify and treat suicide tendencies in soldiers, and will release a simulation in January that trains people how to counsel a woman who was just raped.
Olsen said he is talking with companies in the communications and pharmaceutical industries to develop tailored programs that train in performance evaluation and sales.
Randall Hill, executive director of the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, created a cultural awareness trainer for the military that combines computer imaging with real props.
Only the military has the resources to drive simulation research 10 years in advance, but Hill is focused on outside applications like education, he said.
"That's my dream. I want to see these technologies used to transport you to another time and place and be able to interact with people from other cultures," Hill said. "I think we can enhance social skills and cultural knowledge."
