Yes- you did just read the title right. MATH VIDEO GAMES ARE HEALTHY FOR YOUR BRAIN.
Ive brought you good news, all that time you spent playing World of Warcraft might have just made you smarter! A study shown on the Stanford website just showed that playing video games just 10 minutes each day can make you better at math.
The study involved two students of third grades, one group was taught math in the standard manner. The other was given 10 minutes each day to play the game Wuzzit Trouble on school issued iPads. (I hate technology at a young age so this made me cringe)
The video game playing group demonstrated significant improvement in what the researchers call number senses including an improved ability to apply their number sense to a problem.
But wait, whoa, not so fast! Before you pick up that controller and think that any video game is good for you, I should note that the study was based on a very PARTICULAR game.
Certainly other similar games might see a similar effect, but I suspect Pokemon does very little to improve one’s number sense. And according to people who know a lot about this sort of thing, most math video games marketed as educational tools aren’t even all that impressive.
This study showed that it was well-timed,revised guidelines for kids and screentime, namely, that screens aren’t as bad for little brains as they initially thought.
So maybe i don’t need to worry about giving my kids i nanny screen time…. or do it?
For full-grown brains of grown-up mathematicians, the internet is highly educational addictive math games. I learned about several online games exploring geometry and dimension and how it really can be fun and educational!
So maybe we need to stop all the fuss about screen time- and let the kiddos play educational games, rather than non educational to increase brain power!
What are your thoughts?
Web Resource:
MATH 