Research bears out what we’ve known for a long time: Humans learn best by doing. By employing some of the engaging, time-tethered, reward and repetitive benefits of game design, we improve effectiveness. The military has commissioned studies on this—the most telling one presented at IITSEC several years ago (PDF linked here).. And that study does NOT include the benefits from Virtual Reality which allows powerful immersion and the building of muscle memory.

The table below was created from Figure 10 in the study. It shows a 17% increase in accuracy and in 28% less time. It’s from “Using Games to Accelerate Aircrew Cognitive Training” by Arizona State University and funded by several branches of the U.S. Military.

Virtual Reality

There have been a number of studies to measure Virtual Reality effectiveness. But we can do even better because pilots will already be familiar with the procedures through their iPad mastery. VR is powerful, as these studies suggest, considering its low-cost nature, especially with self-guided training.

The study below is part of a paper showing decreased errors with Virtual Reality training and a 48% improvement in speed. These are small numbers but other research has shown similar improvements.