It is something that any teacher, parent, and first responder in the U.S. dread, the news of a school shooting. Some of the worst mass shootings in recent U.S. history took place at schools --- Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Columbine and it is sad reading news about innocent and young lives snuffed out at places of learning.

Authorities have implemented various measures to prevent such shootings to happen, actual first responder training with teachers and students, arming teachers, metal detectors in schools, and more. While the subject on gun control to help prevent such incidents is mired in heated debates, with no end in sight, Gizmodo reports of another tool that will be used in helping teachers and it is a high tech one using Virtual Reality that was developed by the U.S. Army and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Called Enhanced Dynamic Geo-Social Environment or EDGE, it was developed as a simulation training tool for emergency services and law enforcement agencies to help them react properly in active shooter situations, which includes school shootings. Here is what the DHS says about the application:

EDGE is a game-based software training application that emphasizes flexibility and ease-of-use. EDGE’s First Responder Sandbox (FRS) is designed to allow responders to train for coordinated response to various types of emergency events (e.g., active shooter, hostage, fire, mayhem) both in a virtual environment via the Internet or locally in a classroom environment. Available training roles in FRS v1.2.1 include: law enforcement, firefighter, EMS, dispatcher, unified command, civilians, and suspect. Instructors and role players may enhance training by participating as armed suspects or unarmed civilians.

EDGE is a training environment that is intended to be a group tool where multiple trainees can assume any of the roles above to execute the desired training. It is not intended to be a single-trainee environment. EDGE is not a training course in the traditional sense, but rather it is a tool instructors use to train their first responder teams in a safe environment, where scenarios can be changed or re-run as many times as necessary to provide a wide range of training possibilities. EDGE also has an after-action review capability where training sessions can be replayed with full pause, rewind, and fast-forward controls to highlight key training points.

As described above, EDGE has been developed for first responders. Now, an update will be made to help train teachers in an active shooter situation. With the update, according to Gizmodo, there will be three playable: teacher, shooter and police officer. As a teacher, the trainee will have to bring students in panic to a safer place; as a shooter, the trainee has to roam the school to find targets; and as a police officer, the trainee will have to find and kill the shooter as soon as possible.

The team that developed the EDGE incorporated some of the grim realities that took place in the real world shootings to make the training grimmer and for the trainees to realize what is at stake when such an incident happens. Also included in the simulation are the best practices in surviving an active shooter incident such as putting up barricades, locking doors, staying away from windows, etc.

As the Gizmodo article also notes, violent computer games were blamed for the Columbine incident, now computer simulations are being used to prevent such incident. What we hope really is that teachers do not need to use this training at all, but then such is the reality of school shootings in the U.S. that they may just have to reach deep into their training to keep their students safe.