Robot Factory: Simcoach Games' brain training game for IARPA

Robot Factory targets three skills that research links to fluid intelligence: updating, which means storing, manipulating, retrieving and replacing key information; switching, which means shifting focus when the situation changes; and inhibiting a well-learned response when the circumstances call for something else. Most games on the market draw on crystallized intelligence, and Robot Factory was designed as the contrast.

The player works as a drone in a futuristic, dystopian robot factory. Levels last two minutes and are called shifts, and the game offers more than 100 shift tasks. Tasks include sorting robot parts, spotting faults, working out hidden rules and holding complex sequences in mind. Each shift asks for three stars, and adaptive algorithms adjust the difficulty to keep the player challenged. The game was built with neuroscientists, and its target audience is high-performing adults.

The game belongs to a research effort of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the research arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Its program Strengthening Human Adaptive Reasoning and Problem-solving, known as SHARP, funds rigorous research on interventions that could improve adaptive reasoning in high-performing adults who work in information-rich environments. One research team, headed by Honeywell, asked Simcoach Games to build a game that would be a central part of its intervention.

At the time of the 2014 contest the game was in use in experiments at Harvard, Northeastern and Oxford.

IARPA's own description of SHARP says that adaptive reasoning and problem-solving are valuable in workplaces where conclusions must be drawn from sparse, voluminous or conflicting data, often under time pressure. The program asks teams to test and validate interventions and to collect cognitive, behavioral and biological outcome measures.

IARPA's SHARP page is online and still describes the program. Simcoach Games also has a working website, where its current games are grouped under assessment, job skills and life skills, with titles such as Booeys: A Rip in the Rift and Cash Skills Collection. Robot Factory is not among them. The Serious Games Showcase & Challenge keeps a page for the game, which lists Simcoach Games as the organization, business as the category and 2014 as the release year.

No official page that offers Robot Factory for play was found in November 2026, so its status is unconfirmed.