Bad news, idiots. Playing on your DS is not, as you might have hoped, going to make you any cleverer - at least, not if the claims of French academic Alain Lieury are to be believed.
In a study involving 67 ten year olds, Lieury found that playing
Dr Kawashima's Brain Training has no significant effect on a child's mental ability, a
Times Online story
revealed today.
Lieury split the children into four groups for the seven week study: two with DSes to play, one with pencil and paper, and one that had to go to school as normal. He then tested them all in three different categories: Memory, Mathematics, and Logic.
Playing on the DS was by far the least effective educator, performing even worse than pencil and paper, and much worse than school.
Unsurprisingly, helping your children with their homework, making them watch documentaries instead of soap operas, and playing Scrabble with them were all deemed by Lieury to be better than giving them a DS to play.
"The Nintendo DS is a technological jewel. As a game it's fine," said Lieury, magnanimously. "But it is charlatanism to claim that it is a scientific test."
The dream's over. Learning isn't fun after all.
Game Politics
Joined:
May 2007
Post count:
387
They tested it against "going to school"?! haha
Are they serious? It's designed to help stimulate your brain, make you more efficient at memory recall, logic and basic numeracy, not completely teach you these subjects!
As an addition to regular schoolwork or as an additional activity for adults and old people fighting off dementia it's a guaranteed win!
Joined:
Jan 2009
Post count:
1
Of course it made them cleverer. The lowest age on Brain Training is 20! So they increased their brain age by 10 yrs. Not bad.
The clever frenchman seems to have missed the point of Brain Training, that its designed for a much older generation to improve the speed of their brain by using it. Children of 10 do this already by going to school and learning new ideas and concepts all day, so using a DS isn't going to make much difference as their brains are already at their highest potential (if they stay awake, take out earphones and concentrate!).
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