Project Overview

• Responsibilities: Interaction design, game design,

  gameplay programming, cutscene animation

• Time Period: September 2025 - March 2026

• Through: UCI Informatics + Software Engineering Capstone

• Project Partner: Katharine Simon (UCI SLEEP Lab)

For my senior capstone project, I worked with the Sleep, Learning, and Emotion in Pediatrics (SLEEP) Lab to design engaging minigames to conduct cognitive research on children! In cognitive research studies, participants will often have to complete a series of tasks while data is collected on whatever the given task is testing. Children can be a tough group to research due to their limited attention spans. Additionally, while the cognitive tasks used in studies are well researched and established in the field as a valid way to conduct studies, they are extremely simple, repetitive, and boring. The SLEEP Lab’s research on sleep and emotional affectivity in children with depression requires cognitive tasks that can gauge children’s emotional states in a more fun and interactive way. The way my team chose to approach this issue is through translating these established and well-researched cognitive tasks into minigames. These minigames will also need to collect all relevant data associated with the cognitive tasks they are based on, and send that data over to the SLEEP Lab’s backend service that they use to parse data. The cognitive tasks my team and I focused on are the Dot Probe and Go/No-go tasks! While the use of games in research is an idea that has been explored before in other domains, the SLEEP Lab is pioneering the use of minigames in cognitive research. The work my team and I have completed on this project could very well help to push forward new methods of conducting research, especially on children. This page will serve as an overview to my contributions working on this project, as well as my thought processes behind them.