Nintendo Brain Games Effectiveness Questioned

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday January 28, 2009 @06:55PM from the flickering-boxes-will-make-us-smart dept.

nandemoari writes "While Nintendo boasts that its Wii can make you fit, the game company's popular line of DS 'Brain Games' have for some time promised to make kids smarter by challenging them with word puzzles and math formulas. However, a French professor isn't buying the shtick. University of Rennes professor Alain Lieury, a cognitive psychology specialist in Brittany, France, recently studied a group of ten-year-old children playing a variety of mentally-challenging games. Not all were video games, however; Lieury pitted more traditional games (including sudoku, Scrabble, and regular old reading and homework) against Nintendo's popular line of DS hits, including Brain Age, Big Brain Academy, and Brain Training. Although he credits the Nintendo DS — one of the best selling consoles of all-time — as 'a technological jewel,' he finds Nintendo's claim that it can actually help kids learn is nothing more than pure 'charlatanism.'"

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Re:so "go bust" means... by Wovel · 2009-01-29 04:05 · Score: 1, Flamebait

That was the most amusing part of the story. Nintendo has never marketed the brain games to kid, nor have I seen them claim to be homework helpers. The brain games where invented to sell the DS to older adults who traditionally did not buy game consoles. Well he is French, probably not interested in reality.