“When you walk in the door, you have to have a sense of, `wow!’ ” said Maine Maritime Academy’s [MMA] Sam Teel, Marine Transportation Dept. Chairman, who designed the school’s new Bridge Simulation Center.
He seems to have succeeded.
The ship-like windows on the doors at the facility’s entrance and the narrow, angled, ship-like corridor pull you in: you’ve entered a battleship gray world. Then you enter the bridge simulation room with its ship’s wheel, various technical systems, and five full-size ship’s windshields with projected scene beyond.
It’s all very lifelike.
The program is called Full Mission Simulation and it encompasses whatever the instructor chooses for the objective of the class on a given day, such as bringing a supertanker into Valdez, Alaska, at dusk.
“All the things that would have to occur, we can now create,” said Teel: “the navigation, the radar imagery, the communications, the ship maneuvering, the tugboat assists. It’s complete in its mimicry of its representation of the real world.”
Just down and across the hall from the ship bridge simulation room is a smaller room that simulates a tugboat bridge, complete with its electronic equipment. Beyond that, the hall opens to the crossbar of a T, with a classroom dominated by a huge screen at one end and at the other, an instruction station.
“It’s like The Wizard of Oz,” Teel said of the instruction station, describing the scene where Toto pulls back a curtain to reveal the wizard manipulating the mechanisms behind his illusions. “There will literally be a big velvet curtain covering the instruction station. “Every simulated scenario needs to be manipulated,” he explained. “This is the place where the instructor has authority over the situation.”
A typical ship handling class, which Teel and others teach, consists of from four to six students. The two-hour class starts with a 10 or 15 minute pre-briefing in which the instructor talks the students through that day’s exercise. The students have come from all kinds of different classes, and the instructor wants to get them in the frame of mind to concentrate on bridge, or watch, team training. He makes sure the students have done their class preparation and that they’re ready to go on watch.
“We’re looking for specific outcomes,” Teel said. “We want to accomplish certain things. We want the students to demonstrate skills and competencies.”
MMA’s Maritime Simulation Specialist Jim Sanders handles the technical part of the operation, putting the images on the screen and showing any number of aspects of a situation while the instructor explains the exercise’s goals.
“A ship coming in from sea and going in to port is an all-day process,” Sanders said. “One of the challenges in simulation is to make something in real life [fit into] two hours. We’re under a time constraint,” he explained. “Our objectives are very short and sweet, so to speak.”
Having completed the pre-brief, the students then walk into the ship or tug bridge room, depending on the class. They have five minutes to prepare before the instructor starts the 55- to 60-minute exercise he has set up, which is timed because of the exigencies of the two-hour class period.
The scene beyond the windshields, the computer graphics, say, of the entrance to Boston Harbor, look realistic. The students do exercises set at all times of day and night and weather conditions. The databases inside the computer, all Windows-based, allow instructors to represent the way a vessel operates in the water. It’s a way to teach and to give students hands-on experience at the same time.
Following the exercise the students return to the classroom for 45 minutes of de-briefing, an invaluable part of the exercise. Rather than using standard, didactic teaching methods, the instructors use a student-facilitated de-brief that focuses on self-assessment, self-analysis. Sanders said, “We can show them what they did, show them the pros and cons, but mostly the good. This is a positive-type atmosphere.”
Teel agreed, but added that none of the instructors would hesitate to give an expert opinion if a student has done something critically wrong. The lessons learned from the bridge simulator will save lives, vessels and cargo.
The system this new simulation facility has replaced, designed by Teel in 1992, was like using a twelve-year-old computer; it needed updating. “It’s an ongoing process,” he said. “Once you have this equipment, you upgrade it and replace it as technology advances.”
The database on the new bridge simulation system presents better visual images and more accurate and true-to-life hydrodynamic models, which allow the ships to respond more naturally. Also, by 2004, Teel said, “Students have grown up with an environment of very high technology with their home computers and various role-playing games. Very few teenagers have not done some kind of video games, sometimes just called gaming, like Nintendo or X-Box. That’s really simulation, whether or not it’s skateboarding or catching the terrorists.
“As you go through those terms, from Nintendo to video games to gaming, you can see how easy it is to go to the next word, which is simulation,” he continued, “my point being that students are very receptive to this whole concept of role play. If I say, `You’re going to have this role,’ they fit right in to it. That’s probably different from 25 years ago.”
Teel began discussing the need to upgrade the ship simulation facility with MMA president Leonard Tyler five years ago. Over time, the project grew from low to high priority, and eleven months ago Teel got the go-ahead and began researching and designing the new system. He then wrote a Request for Proposal and sent it out to vendors for bids. The bids came back with price quotes in early March, and construction started in early summer.
Teel credits MMA’s Sanders, and Ellery Tracy, Construction Supervisor for contractors Nickerson and O’Day, for completing the project on time and under budget. The total cost for the project was $800,000, and a large part of that figure was funded through the academy’s capital campaign.
Because this is a new system, Teel, Sanders and company have to write all new programs for their exercises and they’re racing against time. “In some instances,” Teel said, “we’re a week ahead; in some exercises we’re five weeks ahead [of the lesson plan]. It’s such a huge process, but we’re operating: we’re down there with the students.”