Teaching With Games, Brain Training and beyond

It's certainly an interesting challenge to write a blog post describing a game that would educate and communicate what this blog is about. It would be similar to writing a book explaining how to read a book, which has been done, quite well.

The first idea that comes to mind is something along the lines of a tutorial. A variety of games are displayed allowing the user to play each one for a short amount of time. Then the screen would change and it would explain what the game was about, why you played it, where it came from etc… The games would be of all kinds and subject matter giving a broad scope of the field. The end of the game there might be some kind of quiz or challenge that the user would have to complete to show that they understand the material. Blah, blah boring same old same old that educational video game companies have been making time after time.

My next genius idea (all my ideas are genius ideas, some just better than others) is to make an RPG (role- playing- game for all the noobs). You would be able to design your own avatar, much like in second life and others, and then take an assessment test. This assessment would be a series of brain games designed to test your level "brain abilities" in a variety of different subjects, memory, attention, information processing, etc… Once the assessment was complete you would begin your travels as an adventures young hero traveling the virtual world discovering new places and events. Along the way you would find characters and tasks (quests for the nerds) that would allow you to play more brain games and increase your skill points. As you increased your skill points there would be opportunity to gain levels at which point new and exciting adventures would be unlocked.

The world would be divided up into different lands each focusing on a different measure of brain activity. In each world the tasks presented would be focused on increasing some measure of cognitive control. As you completed the tasks and talked to the characters of the land you would learn more about that particular field of brain training. For example, in the land of memory you would have to do tasks related to increasing your ability to remember items. You would also learn about such cognitive ideas like short and long term memory.

The end of the game would be a culmination of all the different tasks where you would have to defeat the leader of the evil doers who has plagued the land long enough. You would have to defeat him by playing another assessment where your skills would again be tested. Hopefully, the game will then show you how much you have improved during your days of training and you can rest soundly knowing that the virtual world can live in peace.

The RPG version of communicating brain training would have several advantages over the classically duplicated tutorial version. One, it would be fun. There would be plenty to do, you would have the freedom to do it in the manner you wanted, and there would be plenty of rewards to keep you interested. Two, It gives the opportunity for the user to see firsthand how brain training games are supposed to work. Shall we say, proof by example. Lastly, it doesn't have the educational stigma that comes around with tutorial like scenarios. RPG's are adventures and exciting and people begin playing them with the idea that this is supposed to be fun. Tutorials have the opposite effect where they remind the user that the purpose of the program isn't to have fun but to collect information as fast as possible.

In conclusion, RPG equals awesome and fun while the crappy tutorial like stuff educational companies put out today couldn't be more useless. I'm surprised they don't have more RPG like games out there for other subjects. I would have loved to learn calculus by traveling through the world defeating evil terrorist derivates or gorilla warrior integrals. I could have come home at night and practiced computing the area under my laser beam or the optimal angle and velocity of my arrow. In fact thinking back on it how I got through school with just sitting in front of a math book is beyond me. With any luck, when my kids come and ask for help on their homework, I can pick up a controller and fight the evil multiplication monster with them.

A first attempt

Brain Training and Visual Communication

Pictures are a form of visual communication used to portray a quick, easy to remember, notion of what the authors point is. The subject of brain training is a fairly abstract field and to make an effective visual representation can be a challenging task. After looking through the industries attempt at visual communication there is certainly a trend towards more computer generated graphics, here's a smiling brain lifting weights. This trend isn't surprising considering how much easier it is to generate images that more directly represent subjects in the field, such as happy brains.

One of the biggest players in the industry is still keeping to traditional marketing images. Nintendo's Brain Training 2 uses an image of Nicole Kidman to show how sexy brain training can be. The image is very bright with a pleasant flower filled background. The image has a relaxing happy vibe almost punching you in the head. An interesting part of this picture is the apparent age of the person using the game, Kidman. The big selling point of Brain Training games by Nintendo is that they keep your mind young. Kidman doesn't look too old or too young. I think the image is supposed to attract a wide range of ages and portray that the game is for both young and old. Oddly enough, I also remember a commercial series run by Nintendo starring Beyonce playing their Brian Training game. An extreme change of user compared to their normal audience of 10 year old boys.

I did find one company still using real photography in a lot of their work. One of the best images I found on their site is the picture signifying the link for the program portion of their website. The picture summarizes the science and effort put into the program. It shows a computer with a cool graphic of a brain on it and a smart thoughtful looking guy. It screams science and technology, making you feel confident that whatever this thing is it works. The picture is well lighted with a very bright background which gives a focus on the scientist and computer. The image has the computer screen cut off slightly and placed nicely in the right third of the picture. It utilizes a lot of the strategies we talked about in class well. Hopefully, I can take a photo that is half that good.

Intelligent chimps no match for college students

Were not the only "intelligent" creatures around. Actually, in some ways we may not even be the most intelligent creatures around. Researchers from the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University have shown that chimpanzees can have an exceptional memory (Inoue, S. and Matsuzawa, T. 2007, Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees, Current Biology, 17(23): R1004-R1005). The test used to make this claim is called a "limited hold memory task". In this test Arabic numerals, 1 to 9, will appear on the screen in a grid of 8X5. After a very short period of time white blocks cover the numerals just displayed so they are no longer visible. The object is to click on the blocks in order from lowest to highest. The numerals do not have to be consecutively sequential (ex 1,2,3,4 or they could be 1, 5, 7, 9). The coolest part about this research is that when they put chimpanzees in head to head competition with college students, there was no competition. Chimpanzees seem to be much better at this task. Here is a video of Ayumu completing the task.

Could this be some sort of super chimpanzee that was gifted with this particular skill at birth? Probably not, as there were two other chimpanzees in the study that were doing just as well. Could the chimp be more interested or motivated than the people? The chimp was getting a peanut for a successful task while people may not put the same value on a single peanut. I don't think this is the case, as being a college student I personally wouldn't want to be beaten by a monkey at a cognitive task. Maybe, that's just me though. Here is a cool way to test your own ability versus ayumu. I wasn't anywhere near chimp skill and I was trying very hard.

One difference that could explain the findings is that chimpanzees may be able to visually traverse an image faster than humans. At the fastest stimuli presentation there is not enough time for the average human to move their eyes to each number. The chimp may just have more visual information to work with than humans, rather than having a more powerful working memory. However, more research on chimp visual processing would have to be done in order to make any real claims on this theory.

The best critic about this research is that the paper doesn't do a very good job on explaining how much training the humans had before the comparison was made. Ayumu was trained on this task since the age of 4, with 50 trials a session, 4 sessions a day, 5 to 6 days a week. It would have been nice to have seen how much practice the human participants had been given. I don't see it reasonable to go through the same exact process as the chimpanzee but it may make a difference if they had never played the game before or if they had 1000 trials of practice before hand.

The researcher's paper concludes with that child monkeys may have a more powerful eidetic memory than adult humans. In other words chimpanzees can remember more details about a visual scene than humans. They also mention that eidetic memory has been shown to decline with age, which may be another reason for the chimp's victory. Either way it's pretty awesome to see a chimp complete such a difficult task. I wonder how many other animals could have intelligences like this. If only there was a way to run dolphins through the same task.

Here is a 10 minute video by the researchers on ayumu and the study.

Be a participant in the biggest brain training experiment ever

Are you interested in trying out this brain training stuff? If so, there is a really cool new training program by the BBC. It's super easy and completely free, just sign up and start. You take a few quick benchmarking tests to start and then you can begin training. They ask that you train three times a week for six months if you want your data to be included in the analysis. It may seem like a long time but the games are pretty entertaining and it really isn't too much of a time drain at around 10 minutes a clip.

The website claims that it's going for the biggest trial ever completed, so the results should be super interesting. If you sign up now your data probably won't be included in the six month analysis that will be broadcast sometime this spring (hopefully soon). However, they are going to do another analysis that will be in published papers later in 2011.

The goal of the experiment is to see if brain training really works. There is a lot of controversy in the literature at the moment and hopefully this experiment can help clean some of it up. This is the basic idea behind it. First, you complete a series of tasks to get a measure of different mental attributes. After that you will train on a variety of different tasks that you will (hopefully) improve at as you practice. Finally, after six months you will complete a new set of tasks. This new set of tasks will be measuring the same mental attributes as the first benchmark tested but in a different way. This is to ensure you just didn't get better at playing any specific game. With all this data they will run some fancy statistics on it and see if the training tasks significantly improved a significant amount of people's benchmark score.

The statistics will be interesting to see because of the internet based platform the experiment is run off. Running the experiment through a website allows lots of people to participate, but it also allows lots of other variables to factor in. At what time and place was the training completed, after a hard day at work or sitting on the beach? Was the same person taking the test and training? Was the person cheating at the test or benchmarking tasks?

At any rate I highly recommend everybody sign up and give it a try. Unless you are already in a study of some sort then please don't, as you will be getting different kinds and amounts of training than you should be. The video below is an excerpt from the show that is working with scientists to make this thing happen.

Virtual Reality Brain Training for Athletes

One of the obvious benefits brain training programs may have is in an increase in the ability to solve problems in school and in daily life. However, some people are exploring new fields in which to utilize brain training technology. People like Jocelyn Faubert of the University of Montreal are exploring brain training software and the benefits it may have on athletes.

Faubert uses Wayne Gretzky to emphasize that it takes a lot more than exceptional athletic ability in order to be a super star in any sport. He declares that the super star's amazing career in hockey was not due to a superior athletic ability, but rather his amazing ability to perceive, predict, and react to all kinds of circumstances on the ice. This mental agility that Gretzky held is what Faubert is attempting to pass on to athletes around the world.

He has developed a set of software that provides training programs designed to increase athlete's ability to perceive and react on the field. The coolest part about this software is that it's designed to work in an immersive 3D environment. EON Reality produces a 3 sided room like structure designed to give its user the visual appearance of being in another space (It looks pretty awesome from the demo on the webpage). Add on a motion tracking device and some fairly sophisticated simulations can be achieved.

The software is a compilation of simulation movements and training games. Some of the activities seem to be similar in concept to the sports games on the Wii console. The other types of games are more interesting. They focus on increasing concentration, perception, information management, and decision making. They appear to be pretty similar to the kind of games produced by a lot of other brain training companies, just with a virtual reality twist.

The setup looks like a lot of fun, a sort of Wii on steroids, but I wonder if it's really necessary. If the same sort of brain training games can be replicated on the computer what is the advantage of the 3D setup, besides being more fun and engaging? This question really boils down to a core problem in the area of brain training. Do the increases you see under the brain training program transfer over into different contexts of life? Does increasing your score at some brain training game by 300% make you score 300% higher on your next exam? The problem of transferring the success seen in the brain training games to other real life situations is an important one.

So, let's go back to the original question of why not just play the games while sitting down on the computer. The problem may be that increases seen on games while at the computer are not transferred over into athletic activities. Research done by Thorndike and Woodworth (1901) show that the more similar the learning event and new event are the more transfer will occur (the theories on transfer of learning are incredibly controversial). If this is true then it makes sense that realistic physical movement of virtual reality should result in more transfer of improvements to athletes. Faubert just might be on to something.

In any case athletes are trying. The richest sports club in the world is willing to give it a try.

Socially Driven Competition in Brain Training Software

 

Social networks are a great way to get lots of people interested in games of all sorts. Facebook has shown just how popular some games can be when you add the element of friendly competition. For instance, the game of Tetris, everybody has probably played or seen Tetris. The game of Tetris by itself is entertaining. However, you haven't really played Tetris until you are in a heated battle with some of your closest friends for the highest score. The added element of competition between others can make the simplest games into exciting battles.

Video game makers have figured out and capitalized on how much more exciting a game can be when played with others. One would be hard pressed to find a big new title game coming out of the industry that doesn't offer some sort of multiplayer dimension. Just look at the popularity of World of Warcraft, with around eleven million people playing every month. The environment, the story, and the action are all important parts of what makes WoW so addicting. Although, I'll argue that what really set WoW apart in terms of popularity was that it gave the opportunity for people to compete in an endless struggle for better and stronger characters. Players in WoW are constantly bettering themselves with higher levels and better gear (armor, weapons, etc…). The attractiveness of the game arises in that everybody is working hard to make themselves better than the next player.

A whole paper could probably be written about WoW and its own social dynamic but I'll try and get back on track. The point is that games are more fun when you can play to make yourself better and then compete to compare yourself versus others. When Tetris Friends was launched on Facebook literally millions of people jumped on board and started competing with each other. And it's not alone there are hundreds of different games on Facebook.

It turns out that Facebook is great platform for socially interactive based games. For instance the Facebook based game FarmVille has over 80 million users every month. That's eight times the amount of users that WoW has. Another game called Mafia Wars has 24 million users. With a bit of research it turns out that Facebook has eight different games with more monthly users than WoW.

So in conclusion socially based games are popular and Facebook provides an amazingly effective platform to manifest these games to people. What does this have to do with Brain Training software? Well most brain training software consists of a collection of games. The point of these games is for people to get better at them. The idea is that the better users are at the game the smarter they will become. Facebook and social networks in general, seem like a great platform to create this drive to be better and better at the games Brain Training software provides.

Just as there are the stand-alone games, like WoW, and the Facebook based games in the video game industry the divide remains in the Brain Training software industry. Companies like Luminosity offer their own attempt at social communities to try and drive social competition in their games. Luminosity offers features such as communicating with people that play the same games and the ability to make friends in the community, just as WoW offers its own similar social features.

An example of Brain Training on Facebook is an application called Who has the biggest brain. The company that makes it, Playfish, does not have the same scientific experience and makes none of the impressive claims that many of the big Brain Training companies do. But the socially based brain training concept is something that should be paid attention to. The application allows you to play four different games with each one supposedly measuring some dimension of intelligence. Once the assessment is complete it takes the results of each game and gives you a reading on the size of your brain. Your brain size can be seen by friends who joined the application. The idea is that you can keep playing and get better at all of the games which would increase your "brain size" allowing you to win prizes for having the biggest brain among your friends. This is a pretty cool concept. It certainly creates competition and a desire to get better at the games in order to overcome your friends.

The real downside to the application is that it's not really made with any scientifically based research. If you could take all the science from Luminosity and combine it with the intense competition provided by Playfish then a pretty sweet brain training application could be made.

I believe that there is a strong future for socially based brain training games. It is only a matter of time before programs like these pop up all over the place. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't constrained to the Facebook platform either. Brain Training games like these may see their way into classrooms where students in school will compete to achieve high scores in games that will increase their intelligence. Just as grades are proudly flaunted in today's schools brain training games high scores may be the true measure of success in the schools of the future. I believe that brain training games will make a huge impact in our society very soon.