The Experience Accelerator: Tools for Development and Learning Assessment

The Systems Engineering Experience Accelerator is a new approach to developing the systems engineering and technical leadership workforce, aimed at accelerating experience assimilation through immersive, simulated learning situations where learners solve realistic problems. A prototype technology infrastructure and experience content has been developed, piloted, and evaluated. While the prototype has proved useful, its ability to support a community of educators and developers is limited by the challenges in creating or changing experiences. This paper discusses a set of tools built to reduce those challenges and enable educators to more easily design, develop, and share experiences. The tools fall into three major categories – simulation tools for building and testing the experience environment models, experience building tools that support defining effective learning scenarios, learner interactions and events, and learning assessment tools to measure the efficacy of the experience. The authors describe the capabilities of the tools and provide an evaluation of their capabilities based on the update of an existing experience, the development of new educational experiences, and the application to learning assessment in a class environment.