Abstract:

Researchers show that there is a direct correlation between simple brain games and an improvement in brain health and cognitive aspects through learning new skills. Video games give provides a chance to exercise the brain in different places and situations [1].

Video games are designed with two main goals: for enjoy and sustained the player engagement. Many of the existing video games involve high levels of art, captivating music and stories in order to create attractive environments for an enhanced player experience. Thus, video games typically involve mechanics for game designing that conduct the player to be both challenging and fun, keeping in mind to offer positive and negative feedback in appropriate situations.

Cognitive games must address the following factors related to the quality of the cognitive training [2]: fun, motivation to play, and the adaptivity of the game. Their main scope is to train the brain for memory loss, attention disorders, making it possible to train the brain while having fun. Also, such games are useful to use also as an educational platform designed for schools by exploring brain functions related to cognitive development.

In [3] authors show that serious games with virtual reality obtain an increase improvements of cognitive abilities. This paper proposes a set of serious games as a learning platform for cognitive training with the help of virtual reality. We plan to see how efficient is a serious game with virtual reality as a learning platform in this direction. The games have simple functioning mechanics. For example, one type of game is the following: it introduces the user into a natural scene using virtual reality. In the scene there are different objects with different sizes, colors and orientations and the objects will move through the scene. The user must collect objects in order to create a story with them or to create a picture composed of the collected objects (similar with a puzzle). To make the game more attractive for each user, the designing of the game is adapted based on both the user profile and the user performance. The scene will be adapted to the user profile and his preferences – each user will have a profile created on game starts. For example, if the user likes to climb the mountains he will be placed into a mountain based scene. Also, the performance of the user will influence the designing and the difficulty of the game level: if the player is successful the difficulty level will rise, otherwise the difficulty level will decrease. Machine learning techniques will be considered for creating adaptive games, eg. reinforcement learning techniques.

We expect that the proposed games can also help teachers to:
i) implement methodological improvements,
ii) prevent of poor school performance and also
iii) to correct learning problems.

References:
[1] https://www.seniorliving.org/lifestyles/brain-games-for-seniors/
[2] Joaquin A Anguera, Adam Gazzaley, Video games, cognitive exercises, and the enhancement of cognitive abilities, Current Opinion in [3] Behavioral Sciences, Volume 4, 2015, Pages 160-165, ISSN 2352-1546, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2015.06.002.
[3] Pedro J. Rosa, Carla Sousa, Bruno Faustino, Fernando Feiteira, Jorge Oliveira, Paulo Lopes, Pedro Gamito, Diogo Morais, The effect of virtual reality-based serious games in cognitive interventions: a meta-analysis study, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on ICTs for improving Patients Rehabilitation Research Techniques, pp. 113-116, 2016

Keywords:

Serious games, cognitive training, adaptive games.