Leveling Up Neurodiverse Talent: UC San Diego’s NDTech Interns Debut Serious Games

Story by:

• Mika Ono- [email protected]

Published Date

In late August, the 2025 cohort of NDTech interns gathered in QI's auditorium to present the results of their summer's work. Welcoming the crowd of enthusiastic supporters were NDTech co-directors Shana Cohen, associate professor in the Department of Education Studies in the UC San Diego School of Social Sciences, and Neil Smith, QI associate research scientist and co-director of QI's Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability.

"This is the first time that Shana and I have co-directed this program," Smith said. "It has been a remarkable experience for me to see the interns this year, the tasks that they took on, and the learning they achieved. The games that you're about to see are quite amazing."

Cohen provided background on the program, which was previously directed by UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Chair Pam Cosman and which has been running since 2018: "Why video games? Neurodivergent individuals are heavily represented in the gaming industry, and game development can almost fit in a two-month summer program. It requires a range of skills, and it's also a growing industry."

Smith added that video games have evolved to be more than entertainment, providing compelling tools for research and education.

Over the course of the nine-week program, the 19 interns worked in four teams, each assuming a specific role in their group, such as artist, programmer, project manager, systems developer or sound designer. With the support of coaches, the teams met every weekday to work on a game requested by a client. Clients, who came from both business and academia, checked in with their group once a week to answer questions and provide direction.

Game-Based Learning: From Wildfires to Cancer

The interns created serious games that addressed a variety of impactful topics.

The first team's game was "Hoyo Negro" (Spanish for black hole), named after an underwater cave on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula that has been a rich source of paleontological discoveries-including human remains and an 80-pound pelvis of a now-extinct giant ground sloth. The team's client was Dominique Rissolo, a QI research scientist with the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative and an associate director of the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology.

Cabe Trenton Lee, the team's game/sound design manager and a student at Brigham Young University, said, "Our team made a serious game simulation to better understand how different Ice Age species navigated inside of those pitch-dark caves. The simulation shows potential paths the animals may have undertaken that may have led to their deaths."

The second team's game was called "Habitat Defenders," created for client Matt Lewandowski, senior software engineer with GameDiscover Co.

Jeffrey Yang, the team's project manager and a second-year master's student at the University of Southern California, explained, "'Habitat Defenders' is an environmental power defense game where the player's goal is to protect various native habitats using the power of various native species. The game is meant to teach young people about species conservation and what invasive species can do in local ecosystems upon their introduction."

The third team's game, "Incident Commander," was developed for Emer Tanciatco of Sector 47 Studios, who requested a game to educate people about wildfires.

David Mallett, the team's project manager, noted, "The game concept is: You are a firefighter in charge of rescue operations. The idea was to create a simulation to coordinate and communicate with firefighters and people responsible for organizing other first responders, like police. This simulates what an incident commander is responsible for in real life."

The final team developed "Cancer: Trials and Tribulations" for Rebecca Driscoll of Cancer Help Desk, a nonprofit that provides information to patients to help guide their treatment.

Rose Yang, the project's designer and a cognitive brain science and music double major at Tufts University, said, "We decided to go with a storytelling-style game where you follow a character recently diagnosed with, in this case, lung cancer and see the kinds of struggles the person has to grapple with. The goals were to educate people about cancer, encourage second opinions, spread awareness of vital marker tumor testing and encourage consideration of clinical trials."

After the presentations, which received loud applause, audience members had a chance to play the interns' games and chat with the participants.

'An Impactful Summer'

In the process of creating these games, interns developed a host of competencies. Smith noted interns gained experience with game platforms Unity, Unreal Engine and Unreal Editor for Fortnite, as well as programming languages such as C++ and C#. They also used art, design and modeling software such as Maya. Interns attended professional development sessions on such topics as resumes, interviews and workplace communication.

Intern Ryan Ryan Regala, a rising senior at UC San Diego studying cognitive science with a specialization in design and interaction, said: "I learned how to be more confident as a coder and with real-world skills in general, like interviews, resumes, LinkedIn and having a good presence and making first impressions. … I met some great people and got to work with them. We all couldn't have done this without each other. I'm proud of what we accomplished with teamwork."

"I was the team designer," said Ryan Bell, a rising senior in nano engineering with a specialization in biological sciences at UC San Diego. "I learned how to apply my creative skills and learned what a job environment is like."

Rose Yang added, "I learned a lot during the process of researching [cancer treatment], as well as getting more experience working through the game design and development process. I think it has been a really impactful summer."

Funding for the 2025 NDTech internship, which paid interns and coaches, was provided by the State of California, Northrop Grumman, the Foundation for Developmental Disabilities, Vera & Anil Kripalani, the Department of Rehabilitation, and the Motorola Solutions Foundation.

For more information, visit the Neurodiversity in Tech website.

Share This: