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.