 Surface Warfare Officer School continues to be on the leading edge of training, combining classroom instruction, computer-based lessons, shipboard evolutions, and state-of-the-art virtual simulation to better prepare students for their demanding shipboard responsibilities. The Latoral Combat Ship, or LCS, takes full advantage of this method of training for prospective engineers at Center for Surface Combat Systems' state-of-the-art Latoral Training Facility at Swass Learning Site, San Diego. The course for prospective engineering plant technicians, or EBT's, blends comprehensive classroom review with the highly advanced Immersive Virtual Ship Environment, or IVSE, to develop a strong foundation for LCS engineers who will be performing the essential roving watch responsibilities both in port and underway. We teach the engineering plant technician course through an Immersive Virtual Ship Environment. I think it's a great program. It helps young sailors that come into the military to be familiar with the ships prior to reporting. We train our EBT watch centers through 626 Immersive Virtual Shipboard Environments, IVSEs. It goes over every EOS valve alignment on the ship. It's extremely thorough. What we have is the LCS-1 variant and the LCS-2 variant. Both variants within IVSE replicate exactly what the ships are and how they look. The amount of detail that went into building these shipboard environments is extremely accurate. The valves are exactly where you will see them on board the ship as they are in the virtual environment, which gives that sailor that familiarity and that ownership of that space. Younger sailors today, as they come on board, you know, they're so familiar with video games that it helps them so much when they come into a classroom environment where they can go through a virtual reality which is similar to video games and they remember a lot more of what they do through the virtual reality than the normal legacy teaching that we used to do. What we're trying to do is evolve with those new sailors that are coming in to better train them on avenues that they are accustomed to. They practice repetitiveness by utilizing the EOS, a hard copy of the EOS, and also a virtual copy of the EOS which is inside of the system. So that helps familiarize them with all procedures and procedural compliance. Students pull out the EOS using that muscle memory that they learned here at the E.P.T. course. They can take it back to the ship and utilize that muscle memory to help them align systems to remember to pull out the red book and utilize it. Actually going through the simulator and doing the valve alignment with an up-to-date EOS and marking the steps off as I go I feel is more beneficial to me in learning the process versus just sitting there and watching a PowerPoint. As a critical component of the train-to-qualify initiative, the Engineering Plant Technician course has been highly successful in accelerating the qualification process for its graduates. In the IVSE, the developers put a lot of attention in the details. For instance, right here we have SSDG number one in the simulator, it's in the exact same place, and we go through all of the alignments, SSDS, SDSS, anything that you would need to know about the generator. Being a damage controlman, doing the course, allow me to see the other side of the house for engineering. I got to be more well-rounded and a better hybrid sailor. Everything I learn here can be applied to my watch standing on the ship. What we do here is we train them to qualify. So they come on board here, they hit a lot of PQS items, and before they get to the ship they're almost qualified, but of course it's up to the CEO to qualify them. With the expanding fleet of highly capable littoral combat ships, the engineering plant technician course will continue to play a pivotal role in developing confident engineering watch standards. Surface Warfare Officer School and the Littoral Combat Ship Program will continue to modernize, utilizing advanced virtual reality training techniques to better train and qualify our engineers of tomorrow.