Design and Effectiveness of a serious Game for Children with ADHD

The serious game developed during project HealSeeker is called “Plan-It Commander” and is focused on promoting behavioural strategies in domains of daily life functioning such as time management, planning/organizing, and prosocial (i.e., cooperation) skills that have shown to be problematic for school-aged children with ADHD.

The goal of this dissertation is to describe the design process of the serious game “Plan-It Commander” and to explore its effectiveness on behavioural and neurocognitive outcomes in school-aged children with ADHD. In addition, we tried to identify subgroups of children for whom “Plan-It Commander” is most effective.
The main findings from the design process, pilot study and RCT are provided, followed by an overall discussion of the results. Next, the clinical implications of our findings and limitations of our studies are discussed.
The discussion is completed by suggestions for future research with regard to the development and application of serious gaming in child- and adolescent psychiatry.