What is Smackdown?
The SISO Simulation “Smackdown” is an international cooperative experience where teams of university students—with help from faculty advisors, M&S (modeling and simulation) professionals within industry, NASA, and other areas of government—build and participate in a simulated lunar resupply mission.
Smackdown is a “distributed,” multi-team cooperative competition that occurs simultaneously across multiple time-zones. Participating teams design, model, program, test, and operate a simulated spacecraft—or other mission device such as a rover or satellite—on a simulated mission from the Earth to a virtual moon base. To achieve mission success, teams must consider the laws of physics, gravity, trajectory data, fuel, payload size, and landing site characteristics just as they would with a real-life mission. The simulation is complex and requires a number of components, diverse systems, and organizations—distributed across the globe—to work in tandem, emphasizing and demonstrating the concept of “interoperability.” In this instance of distributed simulation, each team will have access to a common and seamless platform from which to work regardless of location. This will include NASA simulation components, SISO (simulation interoperability standards organization) provided standards (HLA IEEE 1516-2010), industry supplied High Level Architecture (HLA) software, and the option of using HLA toolbox for Matlab.
The idea for Smackdown was conceived by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) engineer Zack Crues and implemented by NASA and SISO Space Community Forum to encourage students to learn about the importance of modeling and simulation. In addition, the event provides students with a great opportunity to gain valuable skills by doing real work in this fast-growing and recession-proof segment of the economy. In the process, students become “job-ready” and more employable than the average college graduate. Smackdown also forges a much-needed relationship between stakeholders in academia, the marketplace, and government.
Why have a Smackdown?
Smackdown is an effort to promote an understanding of the importance of modeling and simulation—especially standards and interoperability—among high school and college students in order to foster networking, employability, and job readiness within this burgeoning and recession-proof industry.
Smackdown seeks to strengthen the M&S community across industry, government, and academia. M&S is an increasingly valuable tool in science and engineering, with applications that span virtually all industries and services. It gives us the ability to imitate and explore the facets of complex real-world experiences without incurring the risk, expense, and time associated with building, testing, and training in the real world. To date, educational programs that provide a strong background in modeling and simulation are rare, especially ones designed to help students become more employable. As more people realize the benefits of M&S, the need to educate, train, and certify M&S practitioners, researchers, and teachers will become increasingly apparent.
Efforts to meet this challenge can take a number of forms such as academic degree programs, non-degree professional education, professional certifications, and educational outreach. More secondary school programs are giving attention to modeling, simulation, and related emerging technologies. However, these programs are mostly in the engineering, computer science, and medical degree tracks.
The lack of investment and planning energy does not mean that M&S leaders believe that a skilled workforce is unimportant. Indeed, numerous stakeholders have identified the need for competent and seasoned modeling and simulation professionals. Nonetheless, members of the simulation community perceive a persistent gap in workforce development and have identified many factors that may be hindering the “mending” process. Smackdown, along with other efforts, is an engaging, fun, and novel way to help remove these obstacles and facilitate the creation of a robust culture of M&S professionals.
Who is involved?
Smackdown brings teams of university students together with M&S professionals in industry, education and government.
Smackdown’s potential as a satisfying, scalable, and ambitious yet “doable” undertaking sparked enthusiastic support from the M&S community. It was demonstrated for the first time in Boston in April, 2011, at the Spring Simulation Multiconference. Teams participated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Alabama at Huntsville, Pennsylvania and North Carolina State Colleges—the latter two representatives were interns at JSC—joined by students from the University of Bordeaux (France) and Genoa University (Italy).
The university teams and their faculty advisors consulted with a wide range of organizations, including: NASA, SISO, AEgis Technologies, ForwardSim, MÄK, and Pitch Technologies. The Smackdown Executive, Outreach, Planning, and Technical Committees, who spearheaded this event, provided organizational and technical advice, recruited participants, and gained valuable publicity. Additional support was provided by other members within the international M&S community. These groups formed the backbone of Smackdown and continue their vital support today.
For the event, students had access to SISO’s standards for High Level Architecture Evolved (HLA-evolved). NASA provided the “federates” or virtual components of the simulation, including the orbit shuttle and transport rover, as well as technical and mentoring support. MÄK and Pitch Technologies provided the HLA software, while ForwardSIM supplied the Matlab programming tools and training, 3D viewer, and Simulink platform, which reduced the programming learning curve and created a more engaging and memorable experience. Other industry and government mentors advised students on technical issues, enabling them to build and populate the 3D simulated environment with greater ease. The outcome was the successful planning, experimentation, testing, and demonstration of their work during the SISO Smackdown event.
For Smackdown 2012, event organizers anticipate participation from universities in the US, Europe, Near East, South America, Israel, New Zealand, and Japan. Additional support will involve the NASA KSC Center for Life Cycle Design’s (CfLCD) summer intern team, Creative Humanics Laboratory (CHL). CHL, comprised of students from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and Arizona State University, is creating a “Smackdown Starter Kit” to enable each team to participate more efficiently and with a higher level of collaboration. This eight-member team will augment Smackdown’s planning with strengths in graphic design, film, web design, creative direction, 3D modeling, illustration, storyboarding, animation, sound design, script writing, and print media as well as engineering, systems analysis, and troubleshooting skills.
The combination of these many groups and skill-sets demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of a trans-disciplinary approach to problem-solving.
