Learning Impact Evaluation of the serious game "Cultural Awareness - Afghanistan Pre-deployment"

Attention to human factor in conducting any type of military/security operations is currently an objective of utmost importance in the context of troop training within NATO. To this purpose, a number of serious games were developed, addressing different aspects of cultural awareness and correctness in approaching human beings during a mission. A significant example is “Afghanistan Pre-deployment – Cultural Awareness”, a serious game widely adopted in NATO Defense Schools to support pre-deployment training of troops for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) missions in Afghanistan. In the context of GALA, the European Network of Excellence on Serious Games, the Romanian National Defense University (MAN) and NATO-STO CMRE conducted a user study particularly focused on the learning impact of this serious game. The study was first run in parallel on different typologies of players (initially soldier trainees at MAN and civilian/military staff at CMRE; then also a group of University students) in order to get different perspectives in the game test and evaluation; results of respective analyses were compared, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of this type of serious game as a learning tool. As a result of this evaluation, the serious game seems to be well received as a new and modern way for quick and effective knowledge transfer; it can be seen a valuable, complementary solution to traditional education and