A team of Stanford University graduate students from multiple disciplines have won a Department of Defense-led competition for military-applied technologies. The team entered a training support app, originally designed to accelerate and streamline athletic training, to the Hacking4Defense competition in San Francisco, Calif., Stanford said Thursday.
“Pilots often lacked accessible, effective tools for staying up-to-date on the mechanical and engineering details of their aircraft or for learning new emerging topics,†said Andrew Powell, a member of the team. He stated that the app would work to address this gap.
Powell worked with co-members Phil Stiefel, Sasha Seymore and Sasha Lisbonne to tailor an existing app in response to U.S. Air Force pilot training needs. Powell and Seymore previously created the Learn to Win platform aid athletes in learning game plans. Seymore and Stiefel, who are U.S. Navy reservists, thought about developing the app for use in the military.
The team visited Beale and Tinker Air Force Bases to gather input on military training and found that current training methods need modernization for streamlining and cost reduction. The submitted app builds on gathered input.
