Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

12.21.09 | Can 20 hours of game-playing improve children’s cognitive skills?

Silvia Bunge, a neuroscientist at University of California, Berkeley, and her graduate students set out to answer that question. The results were better than they expected.

After just eight weeks, children’s reasoning scores, on average, increased by 32 percent, reports Newsweek’s blog NurtureShock. The students all attended an elementary school in Oakland, Calif., with historically low test scores.

“All parts of intelligence are malleable,” concluded Bunge. “They’re all in the brain, and all of the brain shows plasticity. There’s no evidence that some regions are most or less plastic than others.”

Researchers included video games, off-the-shelf board games and card games that demanded distinct mental functions. For the Nintendo DS, they chose the puzzle video game “Picross” and “Big Brain Academy,” and for the computer, the puzzle game “Azada” and the mind-challenging “Chocolate Fix.” From Newsweek:

Perhaps the most important finding in Bunge’s data is that the training helped the neediest kids the most. The farther down a child started on the rankings, the quicker and greater was his cognitive improvement. This is extremely rare in education interventions. Usually, smart kids benefit most, and the kids who struggle at the beginning only fall farther behind. Broadscale education reforms like smaller classes, teacher training, charter schools, and all-day schedules have pricetags in the millions of dollars.

Compare that to the cost of these games, which average only $13 (and Brickbuster [also called Breakout or Brickbreaker] can be played online for free).

Bunge’s team is now looking for more schools in northern California to take part in the STOMP program—Structured Training of Mental Processes. A curriculum for cognitive skill building, as well as computerized and non-computerized games, are provided to participating schools. If you are a teacher, principal or after-school program coordinator, and would like more information, contact information is available here.

Plus: Move over “Guitar Hero” and “Madden NFL,” and get ready for “Immune Attack,” “Discover Babylon” and “Astronaut: Moon, Mars & Beyond.” Reuters reports that educators are partnering with game developers and scientists to create new interactive experiences for the classroom.