Nintendo Brain Training and Schools

An inter­est­ing recent arti­cle announcesPupils to start day with Nin­ten­do Brain Train­ing(UK’s Dai­ly Tele­graph). Some quotes: 

- “Chil­dren at 16 pri­ma­ry schools are to start each day by play­ing on a Nin­ten­do games con­sole, it was dis­closed yesterday.”

- “The pupils will play “brain train­ing” exer­cis­es before lessons after a pilot scheme at a school in Dundee found that it boost­ed learn­ing ability.”

- “Chil­dren at St Colum­ba’s Pri­ma­ry in the city scored high­er in maths tests and had improved con­cen­tra­tion and behav­iour after play­ing the Nin­ten­do game More Brain Train­ing from Dr Kawashima, the study showed.”

- “LTS is work­ing with school inspec­tors and Dundee Uni­ver­si­ty to car­ry out a larg­er pilot of the scheme, with 16 schools using the game every morn­ing and anoth­er 16 act­ing as the con­trol group.”

Com­ments: Despite much search­ing, includ­ing ask­ing the agency involved in that “pilot scheme at a school in Dundee”, we have not been able to find any sci­en­tif­ic paper describ­ing the exper­i­ment and its results. We hope future arti­cles will bet­ter ref­er­ence and per­haps ques­tion the sci­en­tif­ic research involved, so we can real­ly eval­u­ate whether Nin­ten­do games are that, fun games, or can real­ly make cog­ni­tive train­ing claims and mer­it edu­ca­tion and health-relat­ed atten­tion. In the meantime…let’s keep playing.