Monitoring experiences from command and control research with the C3Fire microworld

This paper discusses experiences from monitoring command and control in research with the C3Fire microworld environment. The experiences are based on three microworld studies where a total of 192 persons participated as students. 132 of these students were computer-literate undergraduate students and 60 were professional military officers. During the three studies, different monitoring strategies were used to meet the goals of the studies. The main monitoring goal has been to detect different aspects of the teamwork performed by the subjects in the experiments. The focus of the monitoring goal was: 1) to monitor the effectiveness of the students' work and the communication patterns between the students in a command and control situation 2) to monitor the students' situation awareness (SA) when the students were using a graphical- or a textual-based information system 3) to monitor the students' work procedures and the possibilities of automatically analysing textual information sent by e-mail.