Computer-simulated training on the rise

By Stephen Majors

updated 6:54 p.m. ET Dec. 17, 2006

ORLANDO, Fla. - A loud boy launches spit balls at a classmate. Another kid slumps in his seat, oozing apathy and his desire to be anywhere else. Other students laugh mockingly and make inappropriate sounds as the rookie teacher faces his worst classroom nightmare.

It's no easy job to regain control and coax the students into writing an essay about what they did last weekend. Fortunately for the teacher, it was only a computer simulation.

The children are a mix of virtual humans projected on a screen and an out-of-sight actress who provides their gestures and dialogue. As the teacher interacts with each kid, the actress assumes the student's identity and movements with the help of technology that senses her motions.

Computer simulations, which have for years been used by the military and airlines, are increasingly finding their way into professions such as teaching, policing, sales and other fields that depend more on interpersonal skills than technical proficiency.

The STAR Classroom Simulator, a partnership between Simiosys LLC, the Haberman Educational Foundation and the University of Central Florida, 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.

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, whose errors can be fatal.

"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."

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.

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.

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