Gamification and military training

  Gamification is a technology applying game-related concepts to non-game contexts. A well-designed gamification application could greatly boost the productivity of players involving in this application. Although gamification can be used in various areas, we would only focus on the military training application in this article. 

   Military training is a key process or army. Commonly soldiers need to learn how to operate military equipment and perform tactical strategies in battlefields. However, it is extremely difficult and expensive to simulate a battlefield in the real world for training purpose. And soldiers are bearing the risk of being injured in such simulated battlefield. Consequently, using a game to simulate a battlefield is one of the best options for armies.

    VBS is a battlefield simulation game designed by Bohemia Interactive Australia. Currently, armies from many countries are using this game to train individual soldiers or small units. For example, the United States Marine Corps(USMC) used this game to enable the practice of military tactics in late 2001.

A soldier is training in a game[1]

   There are several features which make battlefields simulation games to be the best choice for the military training. First of all, video games are able to express concepts and knowledge graphically. Before using video games for training, soldiers need to learn battle tactics by reading books. Reading text is relatively tedious comparing to reading graphs. Secondly, battlefield simulation games such as VBS provide multiplayer mode. In this mode, players collaborate to complete a task. The collaboration skill can be practiced during the process. Lastly, games could completely mimic the operation of various military gears. players can gain experience from operating these virtual gears in the game and apply the knowledge learned from the game to the real equipment.

Reference
1.https://media.defense.gov/2013/Apr/02/2000062206/-1/-1/0/130311-F-FE339-036.JPG

UI/UX analysis and suggestion for menti.com

  Mentimeter is an online polling tool. Lecturers can use this tool to interactively collect feedbacks from audiences. This product is used in one of my course. The professor uses this tool to conduct in-course quizzes. In this post, I will try to analyze the user experience of this polling tool.

•    Index page

                         

             The index page is clean and intuitive. Users only need to input presentation code to enroll in the presentation.

• Voting Page

      

         The question is bold and has largest font size on this page. This helps to attract attention from students. The result is presented in a bar graph with different colors. This intuitively indicates the voting result of each option. The person sign and number at the right bottom corner clearly indicates the number of votes.

           There are two minor issues with this page. Firstly the navigation signs are too small comparing to other elements on this page. One of my friend in this course did not notice the navigation signs at first. He thought there was only one question in this quiz. Secondly, there is no progress information indicating element on this page. Students are not able to know how many questions left in this quiz. This may make students lose patience while doing this quiz.