When my kids, ages 11 and 8, bang through the back door after school, often the first thing out of their mouths is: "Mom! Can we play Prodigy?"
After a quick mental calculation of how much screen time they’ve already had for the week and how much peace and quiet I need to finish my work, I acquiesce. After all, Prodigy is a role-playing video game that encourages kids to practice math facts. It’s educational.
Right?
Though video games are increasingly making their way into classrooms, scientists who study them say the data is lacking on whether they can actually improve learning — and most agree that teachers still outperform games in all but a few circumstances.
But there is growing evidence that some types of video games may improve brain performance on a narrow set of tasks. This is potentially good news for students, as well as for the millions of people who love to play, or at least can’t seem to stop playing (see infographic).
"There is a lot of evidence that people—and not just young people—spend a lot of time playing games on their screens," says Richard Mayer, an education psychology researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "If we could turn that into something more productive, that would be a worthwhile thing to do."
In an article in the 2019 Annual Review of Psychology, Mayer set out to evaluate rigorous experiments that tested what people could learn from games. Though he’s not entirely convinced of games’ educational potential, some studies do suggest that games can be effective in teaching a second language, math, and science. The hope, he says, is to figure out how to harness any brain-boosting potential for better classroom results.
Your brain on games
Some of the first evidence that gaming may train the brain came from first-person shooter games. That these oft-maligned games might actually have benefits was first stumbled upon by an undergraduate studying psychology at the University of Rochester in New York. C. Shawn Green gave his friends a test of visual attention, and their scores were off the charts. He and his research supervisor, Daphne livelier, thought there must have been a bug in his coding of the test. But when livelier took the test, she scored in the normal range.
The difference was that Green’s friends had all been devoting more than 10 hours per week to Team Fortress Classic, a first-person shooter version of capture the flag. Green and livelier than rigorously retested the idea with people who were new to gaming. They had two groups train on different types of games: one group practiced a first-person shooter action game for one hour per day for 10 days, and the other spent the same amount of time on Tetris, a spatial puzzle game.
The new action gamers were significantly better at focusing on targets of interest in a cluttered, visually noisy field compared with the Tetris players. The team also found that action gamers could, on average, consistently track five moving objects in a visual field, compared with the three that non-gamers could track.
Livelier, now a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, says that action gamers are better able to switch their visual attention between distributed attention (scanning a large area for a particular object) and focused attention (extracting specific facts from a video). "This is called attentional control," she says. "The ability to flexibly switch attention as time demands."
Though it’s not yet clear if improving this kind of attention can help kids in the classroom, Livelier says, she does see the potential for games to help motivate students—adding a bit of "chocolate" to the learning mix.
Green, now a cognitive psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, admits that the benefits of playing hours upon hours of Call of Duty may be limited in real life. "There are some people who have jobs with a need for enhanced visual attention," he says, "such as surgeons, law enforcement, or the military." But, he notes, all games come with an opportunity cost. "If video game time displaces homework time, that can affect reading and math skills negatively."
In other studies, researchers found that gamers who trained on Tetris were better at mentally rotating two-dimensional shapes than those who played a control game. Students who played two hours of All You Can E.T., an educational game designed to enhance the executive function of switching between tasks, improved their focus-shifting skills compared with students who played a word search game. Not surprisingly, the cognitive skills that games can improve are the ones that players end up practicing over and over during the course of play.
But importantly, these skill improvements are very specific to the task at hand: First-person shooter games don’t improve mental rotation of objects, and Tetris doesn’t improve visual attention. And ironically, in assessing studies for his review, Mayer found no convincing evidence that so-called brain-training games for healthy adults, such as the Luminosity suite of games, succeed at improving memory, attention, or spatial cognition.
The next step is to figure out how these findings may translate to the classroom, where video games are already making inroads. Many students could benefit from an improvement in their ability to flexibly shift their attention when needed. And though first-person shooter games are not really appropriate for grade-school students, Livelier says researchers are getting better at identifying the core features of video games that drive improved brain agility.
"It could be a game based on a doctor who has to choose the right medicine to save the world." "It doesn’t have to be linked to death, violence, and zombies," she says.
"Making a video game that is compelling and effective is difficult," Green says. Not to mention that games designed purely for entertainment can cost as much as making a blockbuster movie. What might be more useful for classrooms, he says, is to design kid-appropriate games aimed at improving specific brain skills that will help students succeed throughout the school day.
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