Summary
The design, development, testing and marketing of
an educational support to help fire officers, mainly action based citizens with
limited academic capabilities to learn by themselves how to manage and control
major fire incidents with a video presentation bottom left. The simulator was
used actively by the British fire services to prepare their officers for major
roles through the UK.
Major Learning point for Citizen Enablement
The learning by fire officers, citizens in a particular societal role, can be enhanced to a level that they become able to command and control major fire incidents with effect. ‘Positive deviance’ has again been shown as a powerful influence in efficient and lasting learning alongside the use of properly constructed intelligent simulation.
Case
All fire services consist officers, who are ordinary citizens mainly chosen because of their action based skills in the fighting of fires, often bright but academically unqualified. These are important characteristics are clearly important, but as the officers proceed up the ranks they have to learn how to manage, command and therefore control increasingly larger fire situations – known in the brigades as ‘shouts’. This was traditional done by rote learning of the command and control guidance books, almost a book case full of written materials, showing a vast number of issues and considerations they have to consider in such a management. When they understand the theory they then take part in mocked up events at their national training establishment. This is often difficult for people not used to academic learning and is also extremely expensive in terms of the facilities required to undertake the mocking up of the range of contexts they might meet in practice.
The events the Simulator replicates Virtually
In recognition of this, a collaboration between the West Midlands Fire Brigade and several of its officers, including one who eventually became the chief fire officer for the UK, and Portsmouth School of Architecture’s scientific support team, decided to work jointly to create a simulator to give fire officers the knowledge, skills and capabilities of command and control of major fire events. A psychologist from the Portsmouth team undertook a caring study of many fire officers who would wanted to: move up the ranks and learn new necessary management skills; how they learned best; what sort of learning worked well for them and what didn’t; how they could be helped to learn by themselves, with a cost effective support tool. The collaboration of people who collectively had the right skills to tackle this problem, showed this could best be done using a purpose made simulator – itself based around the most advanced visually friendly computing then available; the project leaders major task was therefore to carefully select the team and facilitate their development potential and talent in a mutually supportive way, consciously supporting and shielding the team through its development’s whole life cycle.
In particular, the team used ‘mock-ups’ of the developing simulator and then tried and tested it, in use by normal fire officers and honed it until it showed real potential. As a result its improving capability firstly became recognised by the team, giving them great satisfaction, and this eventually led the team to the creative development of ICCARUS – Intelligent Command and Control: Aquisition and Review Using Simulation – a successful and cost effective learning aid. The visualisation of the simulator was by a university architect well versed in communication of complex topics to lay people (trainee architects), but unqualified in multimedia development or interface design, and a bright computing technician, who at that stage was totally unqualified, but who had shown much potential when exploring the development of the simulator with the team. Supported through regular prototype design and testing with fire officers, which led to redesign-testing cycles to upgrade it’s effectiveness, a simulator was produced that truly supported easy and efficient learning for those who otherwise might not have been able to develop the necessary skills. This small team with different skills, had high capability, but as we said earlier were not initially necessarily qualified to undertake such a project.
Again, the sharing of the best practices by existing successful major fire incident managers, was in this way passed onto their peers in the correct language and using their good ways of command and control, the same ‘positive deviance’ protocols shown to work elsewhere. In this way, a robust and fully evaluated interactive videodisc/CDI distance learning package, for use by fire brigade personnel, of station officers and above, was developed to enable them to exercise the skills needed for the management of large fires. As such the project has demonstrated:
- the importance of artificial simulation in training for disaster management
- the possibility of learning from the skills of successful fire managers through simulation
- that a team of dedicated academics can learn the skills necessary to support the very particular kind of learning for citizens who wish to take on additional managerial responsibilities.
The developed package has proved a powerful ‘shell’ for the design of future training simulations in the context of managing disaster situations. For it’s work on this project, this particular Citizen Enablement team were also awarded a number of honours, including the:
- ‘Best Artificial Intelligence in Learning’ by the National Enhanced Training Conference’ ;
- Most Innovative Project and a Silver Award for Education by the British Interactive Multimedia Association;
- Best Interactive Development by the European Multimedia Association.
The ICCARUS project was marketed by the Fire Services College who have earned over £250,000 from the sale of its systems software
Major Learning point for Citizen Enablement
The learning by fire officers, citizens in a particular societal role, can be enhanced to a level that they become able to command and control major fire incidents with effect. ‘Positive deviance’ has again been shown as a powerful influence in efficient and lasting learning alongside the use of properly constructed intelligent simulation. The unqualified, but extremely bright computing technician who developed the powerful simulation software, now has a Master degree and is a senior university manager responsible for technical support. The team leader invited people with complementary skills and a ‘reciprocity of perspectives’ to work together, tackling a difficult challenge, and provided them with an environment for freedom of expression and encouraged this from each individual; he trusted individuals, made them feel significant, encouraged a sense of adventure in the development so they had a real desire to come up with the good. He spread his own ‘rage for learning’ to the rest of the development team which also included fire officers from the West Midlands.
The Enabler
James Powell initiated the process and was the main Citizen Enabler who led ICCARUS from its inception. The Portsmouth team who designed and developed the detail of the simulations – Chris Creed, Paul Newland and Stephen Hall were themselves enablers in the way they constructed an educational of real and lasting value to otherwise lay citizens. The development of ICCARUS has enabled hundreds of fire officers to learn how to control major fire incidents.
