Serious games for ADHD: an undergraduate thesis surfaces requirements the literature usually skips
Gabriel Batista Albino Silva and Helena Bretas Goulart defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis identifying non-functional requirements for serious games aimed at children with Attention-Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
Brasília, September 23, 2022
Building a serious game for children is already hard. Building one for children with ADHD — whose attention pattern is not the model user’s — requires a second layer of care that design literature tends to treat too loosely. This is the gap the undergraduate thesis defended in September 2022 by Gabriel Batista Albino Silva and Helena Bretas Goulart tries to cross, under the advising of Prof. Cristiane Soares Ramos .
The work starts from a clinical premise: children with ADHD present symptoms such as impulsivity and inattention, and technology emerges as a complementary alternative to traditional treatment. Fine — but with which requirements? The duo focuses the research not on functional requirements (what the game does) but on non-functional ones (how the game behaves, how it distributes stimuli, how it scales feedback), which is precisely where the difference between a functional educational game and an exclusionary one is decided.
The thesis contributes to requirements engineering by bringing into the design process a set of demands that only surfaces if designers listen to specialists and families. It is a border-crossing work between software engineering and care — the kind of conversation technical curricula rarely teach.
Helena Bretas Goulart also co-authors the paper Project-based learning applied to an Engineering Integration course: challenges and benefits, published at the XXX Brazilian Symposium on Computers in Education (SBIE 2019, Brasília) alongside Ricardo Ajax, Cristiane Ramos and Edna Canedo. The paper documents part of the active-learning experience in Software Engineering that also underpins the thesis.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions.