Transforming Training and Warfighter Readiness

What do language skills and field medic skills have in common? Both are critical to know, especially in an emergency. Both require intensive education and practice to master. And both now have an app to make the training journey more engaging and enjoyable—a transformative benefit for soldiers and practitioners alike.

Here’s the story of a winning idea. In late 2022, a Booz Allen team designed a field medic app for Iron Dev, an annual competition held at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) challenging teams to develop training solutions to improve warfighter readiness.

Iron Dev is a team competition similar to a competitive cooking show, where teams are given a challenge and “secret ingredient” to develop a training solution to improve warfighter readiness over the course of 3 days. All teams consist of diverse members with skills in augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) development, simulation networking and distribution, graphic design, simulation development, and training development.

Concluding the challenging 3-day marathon-style event, judges named Booz Allen’s application as the Best Overall Solution. “We used apps like Duolingo as our inspiration—with badging, daily reward systems, and gamification,” says J’aime Davies. He led a team from Booz Allen’s Immersive Studio in Fayetteville, North Carolina: 3D hard surface and character artists John Carter and Ryan Powell, along with gameplay programmers Chase Henderson and Dewayne Hicks.

The team transported themselves and their gear to the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando and began preparations. They had to wait until the first day of the challenge, when the Iron Dev 2022 prompt is released, to begin forming ideas on what to create. Along with all their gear and technical knowledge, Hicks also brought nearly a decade of Army service to the conversation. This expertise influenced the team’s final idea: field medic training that soldiers could take via digital app, in their downtime or on the road.

“The point of the competition is not just to create but to innovate,” says Chase.

“The game prompt said to identify an area where current trainers and simulations could be improved upon, and we wanted our app to gamify the learning experience,” Ryan says.

“A lot of folks who will be using it are gamers as well as soldiers,” he explains. “They’re expecting the kind of games they see in their leisure time. By designing an edutainment-type experience, we can make training more immersive, intriguing, and fun.”

Day One of the competition involved “a lot of planning and talking,” J’aime says. “With five people, you exchange a lot of great ideas. The first step involved consolidating these ideas, then deciding what’s good and what’s needed.”

“Day Two was a heads-down day,” Chase says. “We were quietly working on our tasks, checking in every 30 minutes, passing things back and forth as quickly as we could to see if it functions as planned.”

There were a few challenges along the way, like a sudden loss of connectivity. “We were working off our hotspots for internet access, since the convention center internet was so slow. Our largest challenges quickly became simply figuring out how to transfer files and running out of cell data,” Davies recalls.

“There’s a lot of sleep deprivation as you’re just all trying to make it come together, and I can’t believe we pulled through,” Powell reflects. “But the joy that comes out of that is the camaraderie you experience with your team, and with the other teams experiencing the same competition.”

In the final step, the team demoed the app from a laptop in front of representatives from leading game development companies and tech-savvy military veterans.

The judges were impressed—and so were the team’s colleagues back at Booz Allen. Leaders at the firm saw the project’s potential to address challenges and accelerate innovation in training, particularly for warfighters.

“Once you develop the gamification system and elements such as the badging system, competitive elements, and leaderboard,” J’aime says, “that same system can now be scaled out to any app you like,” from training soldiers how to operate weapons systems to quickly skilling up welders to build a huge fleet of ships.

“Once we built the environment,” Ryan explains, “it wasn’t that difficult to change the setting and the context—like from a desert to a jungle—and the actual backbone can be applied to any kind of training if there’s a problem and a solution. All things can be applied to that kind of logic.

“The app’s accessibility also makes it well-suited to today’s defense training needs,” he adds. “Even though virtual reality is a fantastic technology—one we work with every day and one that’s innovated on every year—a trainer doesn’t need to have VR to be effective.” If soldiers have their training accessible directly from the phone in their pocket, and the program incorporates gamified elements that motivate them to learn, it can make all the difference in the world.