The members of the EMPOWER consortium have co-designed a set of serious games aimed at improving executive functions and emotional regulation strategies that are considered critical skills for the integration of neurodiverse students into educational settings. Those games have been implemented and fine-tuned through a set of 5 iteration cycles where incremental prototypes have been created, tested, and adjusted. The implementation has been carried out by the technological partners of EMPOWER in close collaboration with the partners from Psychology and Education, and with intensive feedback from a neurodiverse panel. An ethical framework was created and applied to all the project tasks. Initial iteration cycles included the implementation of pilot studies in Portugal and Romania with 72 students initially with a subset of games and finally with all the games, concluding with a randomised clinical trial with 87 students in the final stage of the project. The implementation of EMPOWER has produced an advancement in the integration of children with NDDs, providing teachers with an in-depth understanding of the relevant skills, the way to assess and train those skills with the support of emerging technologies.
The training materials created have been proven useful for teachers to understand the underlying mechanisms of executive functions and emotion regulation strategies. As it was originally planned, all the games developed contain several difficulty levels and take place in the context/scenario of an eco-farm. The Executive Functions games (for sustained attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, delayed gratification, and inhibitory control) were developed as originally planned, in five separate serious games. The games for emotional regulation have been integrated into a single EmotiFest game, where all the different games are combined to improve student engagement. All the relevant emerging technologies (wearables, eye-tracking, machine-learning, gamification, and VR) have been integrated into a single platform that can run in a standalone version or connected to a remote server. All the devices used (computer, tablet with teacher app, smartwatch, and eye-tracker) are interconnected and record time-stamped data, both for assessing game performance and research purposes.
