ENHANCING TRAINING EFFICIENCY THROUGH INNOVATION

Held at SAFTI Military Institute from 20 to 21 Oct, this year's Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) Learning Conference saw leaders and trainers taking part in workshops to improve their training methods, as well as learning new and efficient practices shared by other units.

Chief of Defence Force Lieutenant-General (LG) Perry Lim gave out the SAF Learning Innovation Awards on 20 Oct to seven training institutes and schools in recognition of their efforts in improving learning.

Speaking at the award ceremony, he said: "The SAF has been conducting professional and realistic training for our soldiers to learn effectively, and to do this well, the SAF embarked on a learning transformation journey in 2012 to transform our teaching methods, generate new knowledge and establish the SAF learning network.

"We need to deliver engaging training for our people so that they can learn efficiently and effectively to meet the security challenges facing Singapore and the SAF."

Military Expert (ME) 5 Lim Seng Hin, Head of the Testing and Standards Branch in the Ordnance Engineering Training Institute, agreed with LG Lim's point. "We live in a digital age where people, including our Operationally Ready National Servicemen, learn things differently They no longer rely solely on books for knowledge. Therefore, we must change our approach as the traditional methods of teaching no longer work (as effectively)."

This thought was what gave rise to the Diagnostics Training Using Augmented Reality (AR) project, which won the top prize at this year's award ceremony. A trainee can simply point the AR device at a system or a vehicle such as a Land Rover, and it will teach the trainee by showing him or her the various troubleshooting methods with a step-by-step explanation.

Previously, most of the training was led by instructors and the trainees had to flip through technical manuals to find the correct troubleshooting method.

"It wasn't easy coming up with the AR device. Its image-recognition capabilities were not very accurate initially, so we approached students from Nanyang Polytechnic and worked together to improve the device."

ME5 Lim believes the AR device will strike a chord with the younger and more IT-savvy generations of soldiers, and hopes that it will be implemented on a larger scale. "The device will make training more efficient as more soldiers can be trained with fewer resources."

As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. The need to solve an operational constraint was what motivated ME3 Kee Siew Huang and her team in their project the Mini Integrated Communication System Vocational Trainer.

"Our training depends on the availability of ships, but they may not always be available for use Therefore, we decided to work around that problem by reducing our reliance on ships," explained ME3 Kee, a senior instructor at the Command, Control, Communications and Computers Systems School in the Naval Military Expert Institute.

It was a relatively simple solution: transform an office room into a ship's bridge, complete with some actual ship parts, to simulate situations such as recreating ship defects.

ME3 Kee and her team believe that their project can help newly-inducted sailors to learn more effectively about the operation and maintenance of the ships' communications equipment.

"Going forward, we hope to bring in more scenario-based training activities to give the trainees a first-hand experience of ship operations."