Designing exergames for working memory training using MaKey MaKey

Abstract

Functioning at a higher cognitive level is becoming an increasing necessity over the years, as our society and especially the professional market demand individuals to perform as highly as they can for longer time periods. Starting from school and moving to a professional career, each person has to develop high cognitive skills in order to complete others. Enhancing and improving cognitive skills through cognitive training, is a promising field that becomes considerably important. A core cognitive function is memory and specifically working memory as its condition affects other cognitive functions. Training working memory through cognitive training programmes appears to be beneficial for people and affect their overall cognitive performance. In this work we describe the design process of a cognitive training computer game for increasing the working memory capacity combining the MaKey MaKey (MM) device as input method and its implementation process in order to evaluate its effects to higher education students. The ulterior goal is to extract general patterns and strategies, for game based cognitive training programmes.