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Researcher accuses Dr Kawashima of ‘charlatanism’

It doesn't really train your brain

Researcher accuses Dr Kawashima of ‘charlatanism’

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
Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.