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.

New Scientist’s Top 10 List for Brain Boosting

I found this fun and informative article on brain care and couldn't help but to blog on it. It's a little bit of a sidetrack from the focus of brain training software but it's a pretty good read. I'll summarize some of the more interesting points from the article.

Smart Drugs

There is nothing too surprising here for most college students. "Smart Drugs" have been around for a while now and drugs like Ritalin and Vivance are no strangers to campuses nationwide. The varieties of drugs provide a remarkable increase in cognitive abilities. The article focuses on a drug called Modafinil which can keep people awake and on top of their game for 90 hours!! That's a lot of studying.

Food For Thought

This section provides a bunch of studies showing that what you eat can have a dramatic effect on how well you think. The idea behind this is that the brain needs certain nutrients to keep it running effectively, just like any muscle. The article recommends eating a good healthy breakfast, toast and beans. For lunch an omellete, salad, and yogurt are a good choice for deep thinking bloggers. The article also describes a cool little study where rats that were fed a "junk food" diet showed much lower performances in maze tests.

The Mozart Effect

Multiple studies have shown that classical music can improve people's spatial and mathematical reasoning. Even rats have shown to do better when given classical music instead of white noise before running a maze. The article brings up a good point that this increase may be just because people are relaxed after music. The article also mentions that of course a good way to gain an edge is to take some music lessons. Apparently Six-year old children who took music instead of other classes show an increase in IQ.

Gainful Employment

Probably this blogs most relevant section the article shares a few studies that show training a certain type of mental activity can increase your general intelligence. The article focuses on the idea of working memory and gives a few studies that show it how it can be improved. I'll blog about this in greater detail later, as it deserves much more attention.

Memory Marvels

Have you ever heard of the World Memory Championship? Neither did I. There are some cool strategies out there that allow people to memorize an incredible amount of information. One trick I've learned from a psychology class is to remember a grocery list mentally take a walk through a well known path while imagining each item located along the way. Try it, it works.

Sleep On It

We all know how poorly our brains seem to work on too little sleep. Interestingly enough very little is known about what happens in the brain during sleep or why animals even need to sleep. The article mentions that sleep may be a time for memory consolidation but little evidence is given.

Body and Mind

It turns out that physical exercise can increase the growth of new brain cells. In a study by Fred Gage he showed that one of the best ways for adults to gain brain cells is to do physical exercise. The article provides evidence of walking and yoga being good for you brain. It even mentions a study that shows mental how mental exercise can increase physical strength. The study showed that 15 minutes of thinking about being stronger increased strength by 13%. I'd like to see a little more information before I'm convinced of that.

Nuns On A Run

A covenant in Minnesota is a haven for good brain health. 678 sisters were entered in an Alzheimer's study which revealed an amazing group of individuals with great brain health. The reasons given in the article are the right amount of vitamin folate, mental activities (crossword puzzles), exercising, and a calm positive lifestyle.

Attention Seeking

It can be tough to sit down and focus on one thing in the high tech cell phone buzzing world we live in. One recommendation that was made was amphetamines and caffeine. Another recommendation for concentrating was music and even learning to recognize when you are getting off track.

Positive Feedback

I think that this was the coolest section of the article. The idea behind this technology is that the brain produces certain electromagnetic waves for different states of consciousness. Lots of different programs are being developed that show a person what kind of state of mind they are in. Training with this feedback eventually gives people the ability to stay in certain states for longer periods of time. Theoretically, this allows people to learn to concentrate harder and for longer periods of times. More scientific evidence is needed before this industry really explodes. For now though you can manage some really cool tricks.

Social Consequences of mobile phone technologies

The article puts terms to a lot of behaviors that I have observed myself first hand. I am definitely familiar with the situation in which a "with" group is transformed into a cell phone conversation and a "single". The article makes an interesting point by explaining the behavior of the "single" as a defense-mechanism to the vulnerabilities of being alone in a public location. From my own personal experience I would agree whole heartedly with this theory. I have experienced the situation where a companion has left to take a call and a sense of anxiety arises in me. My own personal defense-mechanism I use, and for many others from what I've seen, is to begin to interact with my own phone. Usually this interaction may be to write an unnecessary text messages, read over previous conversations, or play a game. The interaction with my cell phone reduces my sense of anxiety even though it provides no real purpose. One reason for this as explained in the article is that the activity relieves the feeling of being the odd-man out.

Another scenario described in the article that I could relate to is the idea labeled "Listening in". The article presents an interview where the subject explains how she may listen in on a conversation but pretends to not be listening. I wouldn't say that I to partake in this behavior but it's a nice intro into one of the articles focal points, "Somewhere we are taught that we are not supposed to listen to conversations in which we are not participating." This social rule seems to remain the norm even today as cell phones are becoming more and more popular. Unless the person on the phone is one of my very close friends then I feel like it's not my place to listen. The article shows how people will try and create space for others in order to avoid eavesdropping, such as walking behind or ahead of someone on a cell phone. I see and experience this type of behavior all the time on campus.

One social norm that the article didn't mention is the expectation of access to information. What I mean by this is that people who own internet ready phones are expected to produce answers to questions they normally wouldn't know. I know in my group of friends when I have a trivia like question, for example what was the score of this and this game, I'll direct it to a person with a smart phone. I don't expect that they themselves know the answer, but I know they can easily get access to it through their phone. Also, the response from the person with the phone isn't, why would I know that, it's to immediately whip out their phone and find the answer. I think that more powerful cell phones like the iphone and blackberry have changed the expectations for people's knowledge base.

Another societal change these smart phones have caused is the disregard for plans. This change is again related to people's expectation of access to information. Instead of planning what event to check out that night or what the best route to get there is, groups assume that this information will be available to them on the way there. When an idea for a trip is made little time is taken to look up routes or other events nearby. Groups just rush off with the expectation that if something goes wrong they will have their phones by their side to solve their problems. These changes were probably not mentioned in the article because access to the mobile internet was not nearly as easy and powerful as it is five years later.

Brain Training and Age

So the last post I wrote about Brain Training software ended with a slight bummer. With all of the excitement about brain training software Scientific Learning has produced, it appears to not be all that effective. With all the supposed science behind these games something has obviously gone awry with Scientific Learning's program. Was the software not interesting enough for the kids? Did the program not improve the correct parts of the brain? There are a multitude of factors that could have gone wrong. So for this post we'll look at another company making the same sort of claims of cognitive improvement. However, instead of targeting developing youth, this company is targeting the other spectrum of the population, declining elders. Hopefully they are having more success.

Posit Science is a California company based on the work by Dr. Merzenich (As it turns out he also helped found Scientific Learning and has his name in over 200 papers - busy guy). The company has seen a lot of media time recently and is home to a large and prestigious research team. I'll leave it to them to describe their company's purpose.

"drug-free programs to address cognitive issues related to healthy aging, as well as a broad range of other conditions, including Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment, schizophrenia, and chemobrain." (http://www.positscience.com/about)

It's been shown that once 60 hits cognitive abilities may begin to decline (http://www.healthandage.com/html/min/afar/content/other6_1.htm ). This company is working on creating software that will help keep your brain in top shape as the years start to get to you.

Their website of course makes a lot of impressive claims, but it also offers a very nice study published in the American Geriatrics Society (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122189596/abstract, the full article can be accessed through the research portal). The study design is described as multi-center, prospective, randomized, controlled, and double-blind. Sounds good right? I'll try a brief summary for us normal's. The study divided 487 people into an experimental group and control group. In the experimental group the participants used the Posit Science program for an hour a day 5 days a week for 8 weeks. In the control group instead of the Posit Science program, a simple computer-based learning software was used; the software was basically watching instructional segments and being quizzed on them. The analysis of the two groups after 8 weeks provided some interesting results. In the experimental group they found that participants had gained approximately 10 years of improvement in memory. This was determined by increases in multiple standard measures of memory, independent of the posit science software. Three out of four members of the experimental group also reported positive changes in daily life. Both of these results were significantly greater than the control group.

This is a pretty good outcome for Posit Science. This study shows that their software is a pretty reasonable tool in keeping brains "young". An interesting question to ask is how come this company seems to be so successful at their goals while Scientific Learning is struggling so much. Remember that the company is founded by a lot of the same research from the same guy, Dr. Merzenich. Is the biggest difference between the two companies the people using the software? Perhaps brain training software is just more useful to older brains at this point in the research.

A deeper look into the science behind each game involved with each program would perhaps reveal some clue to why older users seem to benefit more than younger. It would also be interesting to see what kind effects Posit Science software had on a younger population or vice versa. But until that day the result of this study (and others) is good news for businesses in the field of keeping the elderly on top of their game.

Video Games in the class room

The most interesting thing I found from the Baek's article, "What Hinders Teachers in Using Computer and Video Games in the Classroom? Exploring Factors Inhibiting the Uptake of Computer and Video Games", was the divide he observes between experienced and inexperienced teachers.

The article claims that experienced teachers think curriculum inflexibility and negative effects of gaming are bigger problems than then inexperienced teachers. This seems to make sense. Teachers with more experience are most likely older and therefore have less experience with video games; video games haven't been around that long. Curriculum inflexibility and negative effects are both reactions I would expect from people with less experience with video games.

I feel as though (I'm just going with personal experience here, and I'm a pretty heavy gamer) people who play more video games see less negative effects of them. They don't accept the media's stereotype of video games as starting points for violence or a home to mindless zombies.

Curriculum inflexibility is probably a reaction caused by a lack of knowledge of the wide array and depth of the video game world. Somebody who didn't spend a lot of time gaming probably doesn't see how flexible today's games are. As games are becoming more and more powerful they provide more and more opportunity to fit niches that inflexible curriculums offer. In the early stages of the gaming timeline games were made with only sparse environments and even sparser methods of interactions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(video_game)). I can see how it might be difficult to find methods of using these old games to match very specific mandated lesson plans. However, I feel that new games offer a much wider range of possible lessons that can easily be adapted to fit the strictest of curriculum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life).

So now that we've got the more experienced teachers with less video game experience figured out we can move on to the opposing side. The article claims that less experienced teachers claim lack of supporting materials and fixed class schedules as the culprit behind the integration challenge. Going along with the idea that less experienced teachers have more video game expertise these claims also are reasonable.

More experienced gamers see the power that new video games can offer. They understand that the games of today can be creatively molded to fit the everyday curricula. The problems they offer up are that there should be more time to work with these programs and better machines to run them. Video games of today require the latest in hardware support as hardware is always on the catch up to software. Not only do they need the latest hardware, they need more time to utilize all the power that this hardware has to offer. Games of today are complex, intricate, and absorbing. Students would need more time to interact and explore all that the games offer.

So if people with more gaming experience are the ones putting these issues at the top, then it may be surprising to see that women share this same view more than men. In the article it states that lack of supporting materials, fixed class schedules, and limited budgets are all seen as bigger problems to women than men. . It seems unlikely that women would be the more experienced gender when it comes to video games. As it turns out (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4634519.stm) woman make up the majority of the gamers in South Korea (a mind blowing 69%) which is where the study was taken.

Interestingly enough, with my arguments now made, the article says nothing about age or video game experience correlations. The article makes no mention about these two background categories in the discussion. This is strange to me as they seem so trivially vital to the understanding of this problem. The only reason I can see for why the author would leave this information out is that no statistically significant conclusions could be made from the perspective of these categories. If this is the case, I'm afraid my above arguments are bust as they require a correlation between teaching experience and age/video game experience. Either way I'd like to end by giving my resound approval for seeing video games in class rooms.

Education and Brain Training

The relationship between brain training and education (or ones schooling) is very similar to the relationship between lifting weights and basketball.  The idea is that if you invest a lot of time into building up the tools used in the activity you will be better able to perform.

For example, one tool basketball player’s use is the ability to jump. The higher a player can jump the more opportunities become available to score or defend shots. To increase your ability to jump you have to strengthen certain muscles. Obviously, playing lots of basketball would no doubt slowly build up these muscles. But, if you were to augment your basketball training with a more efficient way of strengthening your jumping muscles than you would be at an advantage.  Lifting weights is a much more efficient form of exercise for making specific muscles stronger.

 Indeed, professional basketball teams take weight lifting quite seriously and the players are made to invest a good chunk of their time in the gym (http://www.nba.com/cavaliers/features/kellers_muscle_081205.html).  For professional basketball teams, it is paramount to give their players every advantage on the court that they can. One way they’ve found to do this is by taking a step off the courts and into the weight room.

As discussed in previous posts brain training is meant to be a weight room for the brain.  A weight room filled with machines to improve the tools that are used in education. Figuring out what to put in this weight room has been a much harder task than the squat machine of basketball gyms. Lots of hard work has been devoted to identifying what tools there are and the methods to augment them.

One company is not letting all of this hard work go to waste. Scientific Learning (http://www.scilearn.com/ ) is creating software to act as this weight room and they are working very closely with many different school districts around the country.

Let’s first look at some of the software being used and then take a look at how it’s being implemented.  One of their products, Fast ForWord^® Literacy (http://www.scilearn.com/products/fast-forword-literacy-series/literacy/), is designed to help students with reading.

“Fast Forward Literacy moves middle and high school students toward grade level reading skills, with a focus on listening accuracy, phonological awareness, and language structures.”

In order to accomplish this goal the software is designed to help improve the tools that are used during reading. The tools it claims to augment are memory, attention, a variety of input processing, and sequencing.

“To accelerate reading progress, Fast ForWord Literacy develops critical brain processing efficiency in four key areas:

• Improves memory by requiring holding a word or statement in short-term memory while retrieving picture-concept associations from long-term memory.
• Improves attention by making students focus on the tasks at hand.
• Strengthens processing ability through auditory, visual, and linguistic processing of orally and visually presented stories for meaning and comprehension.
• Develops sequencing through exercises that require using word order to comprehend simple and complex statements and instructions and organizing a response that follows the specified sequence of actions.“

The software uses a variety of different games to “workout the muscles” behind each tool. One of the games designed to increase auditory and visual working memory (a subject I’ll blog about later) is called Lunar Tunes. In this game there is a board divided into a grid with each cell containing either a syllable or word. The grid contains a pair of each syllable or word and the goal is to find the two matching cells. The basic idea is that the player will have to memorize which cell contains which sound or word and with practice the player will develop a better and better memory for sounds and words. This increase in memory ability can then be, hopefully, transferred over to the act of reading.

Another example of a game used in the software package is called Space Racer. In this game there are two buttons, one pointing up and the other down.  Two sounds are presented and the player must decide whether the pitch of the second sound was higher or lower than the first sound. The player responds by clicking the appropriate button.  The end goal of this game is to provide the player with improved listening accuracy and memory that can later be applied to reading.

The software package provides a number of other games that are designed to enhance the tools used in reading. In attempt to make it the games more children friendly the games are made with an outer space and alien theme in mind. Also, built into each game are rewards and difficulty progressions to try and keep the user interested and progressing.  As strange and useless as some of the games may seem there is a considerable body of work behind them that will have to be discussed another day. A demo of each of the games can be found here (http://www.scilearn.com/products/fast-forword-literacy-series/literacy/?tabs=tabSet1:5).

Now that we’ve discussed what the software is it’s only appropriate we look at who is using it and does it actually work. To answer the first questions let’s take a look at one of the case studies presented on their site (http://www.scilearn.com/results/success-stories/case-studies/liberty-public-schools-unlocks-students-potential-for-learning-improves-missouri-assessment-program-scores.php).  The story starts out in a suburban area outside of Kansas City. The characters in the story are students identified by teachers and low test grades that are struggling with reading. The hero in the story of course is Fast ForWord and with a regimen of the software at around 30 minutes a day our characters will all be saved. This seems to be the generic story and it’s not an unpopular one, since the programs introduction in 1997 to 2007 more than half a million students from over 3,500 schools have used it (http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/WWC_Fast_Forword_070907.pdf).

Now for the big question, does the thing actually work? Is the thirty minutes invested in Fast ForWord software more useful than thirty minutes of just practicing reading? Should children be taken off the courts for a little while to lift some Scientific Learning weights? The Scientific Learning website provides easy access to literally hundreds of its own studies that exclaim the program as a complete success. After reading a few, I began to see a pattern of very lazy methodology and stretching conclusions. For example, in this paper (http://www.scilearn.com/alldocs/rsrch/sbr/30115annearundeledurpt.pdf) a study was done in the Anne Arundel County school district. The experimental group in the study was very poorly designed as the group consisted of differing ages, initial ability, and background wasn’t even mentioned. The result of the paper was that more kids that had got “direct instruction” and Fast ForWord made it to proficient level than kids who just got Fast ForWord. This result is very shaky as there was no real control for “direct instruction” between the groups. The papers conclusions were not very convincing.

Luckily, Scientific Learning was kind enough to offer a few independent studies that were more convincing of the actual usefulness of Fast ForWord. The U.S department of Education did a review (http://www.scilearn.com/results/scientifically-based-research/independent-reviews/) of all of Scientific Learning’s studies up to 2007. They found that out of 115 studies 5 of them met the evidence standards of the review. I believe this after reading a few of them myself.  The results of the 5 good studies as determined by the review were summarized as follows:

“The WWC reviewed 115 studies on Fast ForWord®.9 Five of these studies met WWC evidence standards, one study met WWC evidence standards with reservations, and the remaining studies did not meet WWC evidence screens. Based on these six studies, the WWC found positive effects on alphabetics and mixed effects on comprehension. The evidence presented in this report may change as new research emerges.”

Alphabetics here is a category used in the review to examine effect on letter knowledge, phonics, and phonological awareness.

The evidence presented by the education department was pretty convincing to me that Scientific Learning’s program is not quite the miracle tool that the company’s website and research makes it out to be.  This is quite an interesting result for a company that has seen a considerable amount of growth in the past few years. Although, because of the difficulty of doing good research in education it may be that the programs benefits are just not well defined at this point.

The next question to ask after finding this result is why doesn’t the program work like it’s supposed to? Is it not working out the right “tools”, is it even possible to sharpen them? Is it not given to the right kind of people at the right point in development? These questions deserve answers and I’m sure Scientific Learning and others are working hard to find them. Until some of the answers appear though I think it may be better to leave children on the playing field of the class room and wait for the machines in the weight room to be repaired. 

An overview of the Brain Training world

For a long time humans have been devising ways to make themselves bigger, faster, stronger, and yes, even smarter. I think it’s fair to say we’ve gotten pretty good at the first three. In this high-tech world we live in pretty much anybody can wake up New Year’s Day and in six months be able to give Mariusz Pudzianowskia a run for his money.  Can that same person wake up with a slightly different resolution and six months later be eating quantum physics for breakfast? Probably not.  Unfortunately, the brain doesn’t seem to be as straight forward as a bicep and a curling bar.

So let’s try and break this thing down in order for everybody to wrap their head around why these programs could potentially be so cool. Let’s start with what do we use are brains for? Most of us utilize the three pounds upstairs to solve problems, both big and small. The people that can solve the problems others can’t get a special title; we call them smart or intelligent. Of course there is a lot more to it than that. People can be smart in one subject and dumb in another. People can have more experience with a certain type of problem. Some people just work harder at a problem for a longer period of time, “It’s not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer”, Einstein.

Interestingly enough, a man named Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, wanted to see what would happen if you stripped all of these factors from the equation. Galton is controversially accredited with the first IQ test.  Now, here comes the cool part. As it turned out, some people could still solve problems others couldn't. So of course the question to ask is what are the differences between the so called smart people and the not so smart people? What is it that allows some people to solve what most people would consider really hard problems? These are the really cool questions that scientists from a variety of backgrounds have been working on for a while now.

So where do these programs fit in?  These programs (the good ones anyway) are the result of the research being done to try and find the answers to these questions. They are fun, and sometimes silly, exercises that have been shown to work out the parts of the brain believed to be responsible for being smart. This is not to say that all of these programs promise to raise your IQ a hundred points (some do). Science is dirty, especially when experiments have people involved, but the results are in, conclusions have been made, and a market for brain training programs has been established.

Okay, so now that you’re hooked and want to know more I feel it is my duty to provide it. To be fair, this post is a rather simplified and generalized representation of what these brain training programs are all about. There is tons of science out there on the subject of intelligence and businesses are working furiously on trying to turn it all into a profitable technology. Hopefully, each future post will reveal more about this brave new dynamic. 

Intro

Imagine the most important thing you own. Done? What popped into your head first? Was it your car, your computer, your cell phone? Maybe it was the computer in your car that lets you make phone calls. Did you even consider the one thing that allowed you to consider the question? This blog is an attempt to look at the technology that is made to maintain or even augment what I consider my most important possession, my brain.

Being healthy is a big consideration for many people when deciding how to spend their time, energy, and money. There are gyms in every town, fitness magazines in every check out aisle, and “low fat” labels on every profitable edible substance. People want to be healthy, and businesses are more than happy to provide services with this goal. Go ahead and count the number of companies offering a get skinny quick diet. I dare you. Being healthy is big business.

What does it mean to be healthy though? If you go to the gym everyday you can lift more, run faster, and wear those pants from 10^th grade. If you eat right you feel better and have less of a chance of getting sick. But is that all there is to being healthy? Is being “smart” part of being healthy? Would you, or anybody else, be interested in a gym for your brain? Recently advancements in the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience have lead to the development of an array of programs devoted to “exercising” your brain. But these programs are not as clear cut as the bench press or the tread mill of today’s gym.

As this blog develops, I will try and explore a wide variety of perspectives towards these magical programs. What are these programs? Is there any real hard science behind them? Do they actually work and what does that even mean? Who should use these programs? Who are the people developing them? What kinds of devices are being used with them? What would the world look like if a technology was discovered that could make everybody “smarter”? What are the moral issues associated with this kind of technology?

In my attempt to answer each of these questions I will try and be as scientific and unbiased as possible. Let me stress that I don’t have a secret agenda behind the purpose of this blog. In order to make this as interesting and accurate as possible I’m going to evaluate this new found market with a critical eye.

To give you a general idea of what these programs are about here is a link to one of the more popular companies (You'll have to sign up to play the games). As time goes on I will be posting more links leading to more examples of programs claiming to “increase brain power”.