dual-n-back | Devpost

Inspiration

In our freshman year, we took an introductory course on cognitive science and we learned about the dual-n-back task. Hearing that it can help improve working memory, we thought re-creating the game would be particularly helpful for those with ADHD since the disorder has long been associated with impairments in working memory. If you're interested, here are a couple studies that we found that inspired us to make our game:

Attention Networks in ADHD Adults after Working Memory Training with a Dual n-Back Task Training Parameters with Dual N-Back Task Affect the Outcome of the Attentional Network Task in ADHD Patients

What it does

The game will highlight a tile in the 3x3 grid. At the same time, a name will be played aloud.
You need to track both the tiles and the names. For each new turn, you will have to decide if it matches what happened from N steps ago.
- It's a match if the name is the same name that was spoken N steps ago.
- It's a match if the tile is highlighted in the same position as it was N steps ago.
For tone matches press 'e' and for tile matches press 'i'.
You can adjust the difficulty of the game with the slider on the homepage

How we built it

We used React, Vite, and AWS Amplify for this project. We built the interface and game first and then deployed it with Amplify last.

Challenges we ran into

Deploying the game with Amplify was one of the more challenging parts of creating the game. However, going through this experience taught us a lot about how AWS services work and this was really rewarding.

What we learned

This was actually the first time either of us had written code in Typescript, so it was great learning another language. Again, we had never used any AWS services before so becoming familiar with Amplify was great as well.