An Edugame as a Didactic Tool for the Development of Executive Functions

Abstract

The aim of this work is to design an edugame, created at the Laboratory H of the Department of Human, Philosophical, and Educational Sciences of the University of Salerno, as a didactic tool to assess and promote the development of executive functions in children with special educational needs attending primary school. The good functioning of executive functions is assessed through specific tests and is a predictor of the prerequisites necessary for school learning and the development of social skills. The edugame prototype will be composed of several interactive games to allow students to train some cognitive skills at an increasing level. The prototype will consist of several interactive games to enable students to train certain cognitive skills at an increasing level. In the first design phase, work will focus on one of the components of executive functions: inhibition. In fact, the first game was implemented starting from an application created in Lab-H, built on the basis of the circle drawing task, to assess the capacity for inhibition.