UMD Creator of Education Simulations Now Poised to Serve Other Professions
The International Communication & Negotiation Simulations (ICONS) Project’s Mission Expands to Serve Education, Training, Research, and Wargaming Communities
The University of Maryland’s International Communication & Negotiation Simulations (ICONS) Project, which has provided simulation-based learning experiences for students around the world for more than 40 years, recently restructured to reflect its expanded mission of helping to also meet professional training, wargaming, and advanced research needs.
The ICONS Project will now have four divisions: ICONS Education, ICONS Training, ICONS Wargaming, and ICONS Research.
- ICONS Education continues the program’s longstanding work developing simulations for classroom use—for middle schools through to graduate-level courses—with a growing catalog of nearly 30 off-the-shelf simulations covering topics from local crisis management to international negotiation.
- ICONS Training will launch a catalog of off-the-shelf training simulations designed to help government, corporate, and philanthropic teams strengthen decision making skills, practice crisis response, and improve collaborative problem-solving.
- ICONS Wargaming provides infrastructure and expertise for both traditional game execution and wargaming innovation, building on ICONS’ recently completed Defense Department research on best practices for incorporating advanced tools and engaging complexity, and ICONS’ work on games used by NATO countries, the State Department, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and think tanks.
- ICONS Research is a new practice that supports research requiring either human-to-human or human-to-computer interactions, and experimental designs that need controlled interaction environments, identity management, access to advanced computational or AI models, and comprehensive data capture.
“We've been supporting educational simulations for four decades, but we’ve also been enabling cutting-edge research, wargames, and professional training,” said Dr. Robert D. Lamb, Director of ICONS. “This restructuring makes explicit what we’ve been building toward for a long time: a program and platform that serves multiple communities with different but complementary needs.”
The restructuring coincides with the launch of ICONSnet 4.0, a major backend upgrade that maintains the platform's familiar interface and core functionality for human-to-human interaction and role-play simulation, while also introducing new capabilities. Those new capabilities include increased security; better integration with external AI systems, databases, and computational models; AI-powered support chatbots; simulation explorers that let participants query scenario information in natural language; real-time dashboards for tracking engagement patterns; and tools for creating dynamic content during exercises.
“The upgrade emerged from two years of research on how to integrate AI and advanced modeling tools into human-to-human simulations and scenario-based exercises in evidence-based, purposeful ways,” Lamb said. “The intent is to add capabilities that solve real problems for educators, trainers, wargamers, and researchers.”
ICONS works with partners to create custom simulations, too. Organizations and researchers interested in partnering with ICONS can learn more by visiting icons.umd.edu. For inquiries about ICONS Research and ICONS Wargaming, contact Dr. Robert D. Lamb at rdlamb@umd.edu, and for ICONS Education and ICONS Training, contact Indigo Sage at isage@umd.edu.
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Published on Fri, Feb 20, 2026 - 9:44AM