Yibo Hu¹, Moddwyn Andaya¹, ¹USA, ²University of California, USA

Vocabulary knowledge predicts academic achievement and gates access to higher education through the SAT and ACT, yet conventional preparation depends on sustained attention and verbal working memory — the capacities most impaired in the roughly one in nine United States children who have received an ADHD diagnosis. This paper presents a three-dimensional first-person heist game, built in Unity, in which level progression is gated by recall of standardized-test vocabulary, so that studying constitutes play rather than accompanying it. The system comprises a difficulty-tiered question provider over a pre-generated bank drawn from a twelve-thousand-word corpus, a vault-door state machine binding recall to a consequential in-game action, and a guard behavior system that surfaces additional prompts. A one-week retention study with ten participants found the game group recalled 4.8 words of ten against 3.8 for a matched flashcard control. Although the difference did not reach statistical significance given the limited sample size, the observed effect size suggests promising potential for game-based vocabulary learning and warrants further investigation with a larger participant pool.

Game-based learning; serious games; Unity; vocabulary acquisition; attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; standardized test preparation; retrieval practice; self-determination theory