Up From the Ashes..

We are working on a military training project at work dealing with the training of Army Combat Medics.  It is really interesting stuff, and more importantly for me, it was beginning to appear that this could actually be my research project for my PhD.  Corey had even started to push me more into the administrative role in the project...things like pushing IRB approval through, monitoring the test results, that sort of thing.

The more I started looking into the project however, the more I began to realize it was not the best option.  First, there is not a "control" group for the research, so we can not prove our training was particularly effective.  Second, we have no way of communicating with the medics after they leave the lab to see if the training was helpful in any way.  And finally, we had planned for 100 participants, and will end up with only 15-18, so we will not have any way of producing statistically relevant output.  That means the wonderful papers we were supposed to write are instead going to be glorified white papers.  So we will be able to explain what we did, and what we saw, but not enough to get me a PhD.

Anyway I discussed all of this with Corey this morning and over the course of the morning and afternoon we settled on a plan of action.  Originally we were going to do a rather simple research project showing the effectiveness of Mixed Reality training simulations.  Take 200-300 people, break them into a control group and a "Augmented training" group.  The augmented group would have access to a VR training simulator that also stressed the participant.  The goal of the experiment would be to have them come in a few days after training and seeing how they did and proving the Augmented training works.

I had a problem with this scenario though.  Our main thrust of the research was that the stressors help improve learning aptitude and that would be lost in the VR training discussion.  So, after trading ideas we changed our plan.  We really have no doubt that training with VR improves your ability to learn.  We are all about immersive training so we better feel that way.  So in our newly revised plan, group A will get a "Field of Daises" VR simulation, group B will get a "total chaos" VR simulation.  After a few days, we will test and see if our thought is correct - does learning under outside stress improve your ability to learn.

Should provide me with plenty of research material, it is meaningful for what we are doing, and actually is "doable".  So here we go - Up From the Ashes, .Grow the Roses of Success