Evaluation of “cultural awareness – Afghanistan Pre-deployment”: A user study

Abstract

Attention to human factor in conducting any type of military operations is an objective of utmost importance in the context of troop training within NATO. To this purpose, a number of serious games were sponsored by NATO and the Ministries of Defence (MoDs) of various nations, addressing different aspects of cultural awareness in approaching human beings during a mission. A significant example is “Cultural Awareness–Afghanistan Pre-deployment”, a serious game distributed by UK MoD and widely adopted in Defence Schools to support pre-deployment training of troops in Afghanistan. In the context of GALA, the European Network of Excellence on Serious Games, the Romanian National Defence University and NATO-STO CMRE conducted a user study focused on the learning impact of this serious game. The study was first run in parallel on different typologies of players in order to get different perspectives of evaluation; respective results were then merged and compared to achieve a more complete view, and, hence a better understanding of the advantages and limitations of this type of learning tool.