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Nintendo Brain Games Effectiveness Questioned
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.'"
a professor of cognitive psychology dissed your product?
From TFA:
If anything, this actually PROVES that Brain Age is just as good as traditional methods, if not BETTER, while at the same time being FUN for the kids because in their minds, they are at play, not at work.
Can you say "non-sequitur"? As children our brains are more agile because we get frequent practice in school, but as adults we don't. I even remember the friggin' game pointing that one out!
It definitely worked for me. As a kid I used to breeze through simple maths, but as an adult I started losing that touch, frequently needing calculators to do simple math. But when I started using Brain Age everyday, I've gone back to my maths skill level as a kid.
If there's anyone who's a charlatan, it's this guy, purposely withholding statistics that prove him wrong.
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
So DUH, they don't work for children; that's not who they were designed for, nor marketed to! Fast reading of Tom Sawyer, or doing 100 Sudoku puzzles is hardly "kid" activity. This guy missed the purpose by a mile.
To verify, simply go to the Brain Age website and read the blurbs, all aimed clearly at "aging" adults.
For instance there's this on page 1 front and center:
Exercise is the key to good health both for body and mind - and now, with the Brain Age games, there's a way to make mental exercise fun, even competitive. Just minutes a day, that's all it takes to challenge your mind and, with Nintendo DS portability, you can play Brain Age at work, on vacation, or anywhere your day takes you.
And this piece of market-speak Inspired by the work of prominent Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, the Brain Age games feature activities designed to help stimulate your brain and give it the workout it needs
Vacation, workplace, brain stimulation (like a 10 year old needs MORE stimulation?), yeah all typical concerns of 10 year olds. I mean really this guy jumped the on failboat: they advertise/review this at AARP.org (link at the site)
So it seems me Cognitive Psych guy missed a very big cognitive clue: they aren't marketing most of these for children, but to aging boomers! What a dimwit he appears to be.
Brain Age is not aimed at helping kids learn, its aimed more at adults to allegedly stimulate cognitive centers of the brina via calculations and puzzles -- that is supposed to help keep the brain "young". Some studies have shown that puzzle games of the sorts in these games help hold off aging effects on the brain.
How well it works is up for discussion, but saying it doesn't work for 10 year olds for whom it isn't designed nor marketed, well, lets say the study psychologist may want to use Brain Age himself to see if it helps his cognition of the obvious, which is evidently lacking.
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One comment already posted below the article is pretty good. I will shamelessly steal it:
"5. Karen | 01.27.09
Just read a SharpBrains blog post that may add some light:
http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2009/01/27/nintendo-brain-age-training-vs-crossword-puzzles/
"As we have said before, Nintendo Brain Age and Brain Training should be seen as what they are: a game. And the construct of one's having a "brain age" makes no sense.
Having said that, the researcher quoted then offers, out of the blue, one of the less accurate statements of our times:
"The study tested Nintendo's claims on 67 ten-year-olds. "That's the age where you have the best chance of improvement," Professor Lieury said. "If it doesn't work on children, it won't work on adults."
That hypothesis (that something won't "work" on adults because it won't "work" on kids) has already been tested and falsified.
In a couple of recent trials, discussed here, the same strategy game (Rise of Nations, a complex challenge for executive functions), played for the same number of hours (23) showed quite impressive (untrained) cognitive benefits in people over 60 - and no benefits in people in their 20s.
How can this be? Well, we often say that our brains need novelty, variety and challenge - and it should be obvious that those ingredients depend on who we are/ what we do. A crossword may well be new and challenging for a kid, but not for an older adult who has done a million already. A videogame can provide good challenge to an older adult - and probably not to the kid who already spends 5 hours a day playing them."
The article could be clearer in explaining the results.
Math test, degree of improvement over 7 weeks:
Presumably, the kids were all going to the same traditional math classes during this time period, and those classes caused most of the improvement. A better test would be to compare kids playing these games to kids on summer break.
Perhaps the DS games help give kids a desire to learn and an eagerness to take on mental challenges. That would be an immeasurable but invaluable benefit.
The oddest part about this article is the conclusion. After tearing down DS games, the researcher recommends that kids play sudoku, even though pencil and paper games did not produce any better results. This leads me to believe that the researcher had an initial bias against the DS.
In any case, given the previous study, it is quite over the top for the French scientist to call it charlatanism, since there are other studies that show it helps. It would be nicer and more accurate to say, "the issue is more nuanced than often implied."
Were you really expecting a Frenchman not to be arrogant?
I laugh at you and your innocent naivety.