A Learning Strategy Analysis for Guiding the Creation of a Team Training Immersive Reality Environment

Effective training for military medical personnel requires rapid decision-making, coordinated teamwork, and repeated practice in realistic conditions. To support this need, we are developing an immersive virtual reality triage system integrated with the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT) to enable adaptive instruction, monitor team cohesion, and provide real-time performance assessment. Yet the pedagogical foundations guiding short, iterative, team-based VR training remain unclear. This project applies a Learning Strategy Analysis to identify how principles from gamification, educational burst gaming, extended reality, microlearning, and intelligent tutoring can inform the system’s design. Through a targeted literature review and analysis of the VR environment, we identified key heuristic categories, including micro-learning, instructional flow, game environment, roles, narrative problem structure, assessment, and learner needs. The resulting review offers an approach for evaluating and improving instructional design in immersive team-training systems, supporting more effective and scalable training for combat medics.