Take turns stacking pancakes with your partner. Chase your partner around on the screen using your joystick. Work together to carry the bar to the top of the screen.
Those are just the few of the tasks Roger Newman-Norlund, an exercise science and psychology professor at USC, asked players to complete in his new video games.
Newman-Norlund’s research project focuses on creating video games that help children with social deficits, primarily autism but also disorders such as ADHD, develop the teamwork and leadership skills necessary for life.
“The point of the research project is to design something called ‘serious video games.’ The main purpose of these games is to actually accomplish a task, in this case to teach someone something,” Newman-Norlund said. “[These will] help kids develop social skills that they might not already have developed.”
He has used these video games to assess teamwork in normal populations and to make them kid-friendly, but he is currently in the process of testing whether or not they complete their purpose for autistic children.
Although parents and autism academies are often hesitant to experiment with new treatments for the social deficit disorder, the South Carolina Autism Academy has announced that it will use the games in the fall alongside their traditional therapy. Newman-Norlund will measure the interpersonal skills of the children at the beginning and the end of their treatment.
“It’s also important to get kids with autism to play the games to see if they like them,” Newman-Norlund said. “We even hope to work with them to come up with new ideas for games to incorporate.”
Although Newman-Norlund has not completed experimentation, he has already learned some of the special capabilities of the games he has designed.
“It seems like the games can definitely differentiate between kids with autism and kids without autism,” he said. “[The games] definitely have the ability to tap into something, some type of core element of teamwork.”
Newman-Norlund, who completed his doctoral degree in cognitive neuroscience, started his career working on a Joint Action Science and Technology project in the Netherlands. As part of this project, he collaborated on building a social robot that could work with humans.
“A lot of our stuff was applied towards robotics. I was never really fulfilled with that,” Newman-Norlund said. “I thought, ‘this can be applied to humans that have social problems instead of robots that have social problems,’ even though robots definitely have a lot of social problems.”
Newman-Norlund has found this research project much more rewarding than his previous work. Though traditional funding sources are usually hesitant to pledge money towards untested video games, Newman-Norlund’s project managed to attain an ASPIRE-I grant from the University of South Carolina. The best part about the research, Newman-Norlund said, is the actual designing of the games, everything from identifying the correct components of teamwork to being taught how to download sound effects. He especially loves showing off his work.
“I get to watch my kids play the new versions of the games I come up with,” Newman-Norlund said. “It’s very rewarding to watch them laughing and joking around as they play the new games.”