Timely Response to Changing Skills Requirements
Can simulation technology respond quickly enough to new skills requirements to be a viable study and training option?
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Simulations can be very useful when a skills environment is long lasting and stable enough, as in flying airplanes or playing golf, to allow time for their construction. But are they a viable option when situations and skills change quickly? Can they be built quickly enough to be of any value? What factors have to be considered?
The first thing that comes to mind is the required level of detail, determined by the complexity of the skills, environmental interactions, and competence level needed for the skills -- i.e., by their breadth and required subtlety. For simple skills at the novice level, rather simple simulations might be practical, at least at first. More subtle skills involve more skill components and more subtle levels of discrimination, and more complexity and subtle detail in the environmental model. Since each detail needs analysis, formulation and programming, this adds to the programming response time.
Another problem is the social importance of the skills and the level of support -- in money and skilled manpower -- earmarked for the work. Iincreasing the manpower generally reduces the completion time. This makes sense when details can be developed in parallel. The reduction in time could then be sufficient to make simulation feasible.
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The type of skill may have a bearing on response time. Skill complexity or skill mobility may affect response time. Skills performed in-place skills (like those of a lathe operator), versus mobile skills (like those of a tennis athlete), seem easier to simulate, considering that the simulations for mobile skills have to take into account changes in position of the trainee.
There's also the kind of skill where the operator is stationary on a mobile platform, like driving a car, tank, boat, or airplane. Does this have different implications for response time? When the trainee is moving with respect to the environment of the skills, whether on a platform or not, the simulation requires trainee position inputs. But it isn't clear how this affects the response to novelty.
Another factor to consider is how different a new skill is from known skills. Estimating the time for novel skills can be especially difficult if the skills are unrelated to skills we know or skills for which simulations haven't been built.
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Consider terrorism, for instance, or the more general problem of violence. Can appropriate simulation-based studies be conducted in a timely fashion to be of any worthwhile assistance?
Like the problem itself, the matter of simulation has no easy answer. For one thing, we have to ask what the problem is precisely. Terrorism has many forms, and possibly many reasons for occurring. We also need to define the skills needed to combat terrorism, eliminate its root causes, or cope with it when it occurs.
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The programming approach known as OOP (object oriented programming) may provide a way out of the response time problem. In this approach, objects in the skills environment can be represented separately in bound packages, as modules, each with its own properties and relationships to other objects. Appropriate modules can be selected from a pool of available entries to go into their respective environments and modified as needed to fit.
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