The students are 13 officers from the U.S., Chilean, and other navies who have come to hone their knowledge at this little-noticed, 130-year-old campus behind a guarded security gate on an island in Narragansett Bay. The enemy? Their instructors.

The two “fleets” consist of blue and red plastic beer cups and paper plates. Each tile represents 10 square miles. The challenges—including the weather—are real and unpredictable, based on actual sea conditions.

And the provost here, a former engineering dean at Dartmouth and president of Rollins College, says variations on war games such as this one could speed up and improve the ways civilian institutions teach at a time when students are taking longer and longer to earn degrees in fields that are rapidly evolving.

“It’s really trying to develop a mindset that re-envisions education by action,” said Provost Lewis Duncan, whose office is behind a corridor along which hang the life-sized portraits of the college’s past presidents, resplendent in their Navy uniforms

Duncan likens education to modern-day technology, as something that needs to be constantly updated. For the last 500 years, he said, “You went to a university and got an education that was supposed to serve you for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that’s going to be working for much longer. Education is becoming more like the smartphone or the laptop—not something you buy and expect to last for the next few decades. But that’s not the way we teach.”

Instead, he said, civilian universities offer lectures and courses “that we don’t remember anything from, or what we do remember could fit on a 3-by-5 index card. Was that an effective use of your time?”

A civilian himself who began in his post two years ago, Duncan has since pushed to incorporate war games, simulations, and role-playing—already long a part of the Naval War College’s curriculum, but never used as widely as they are now—into just about everything that’s taught there.

“The very best way of learning something is to do it,” he said. “This is applied learning that will stay with our students much longer than the esoteric stuff.”

At the Naval War College, which serves as a professional-development school for military officers, this includes having students play the roles of leaders of hypothetical countries contending with such hypothetical predicaments as regional tensions, refugees, and piracy.

“Those are the kinds of things that you remember,” Duncan said.

New research supports the educational value of role playing.

Lectures deliver what could be called “just-in-case” learning—knowing things that students may or may not ever need. Simulations provide what Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, calls “just-in-time” learning. And he said just-in-time learning, if done well, is quicker.