Lady Geek

As “Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain” hits the Five million mark in unit sales at the begining of this year and “More Brain Training” gets to 2.8 million units, I am wondering if the world has gone mad…

… And then I see this story in the Times; Primary school children are being encouraged to play Brain Training in class to boost their “cognitive skills”. I have no problem with girls or boys playing games. But Brain Training is one of the dumbest games in the whole DS catalogue, and despite it’s maker’s claims I think it’s the least likely to boost any kind of skills.

I have played Brain Training. Its very basic and repetitive – I’d barely even qualify it as a game. Its mind blowingly dull. I can think of a number of DS games that have a greater potential to challenge a young mind.

Brain Training challenges players to quickly answer primary-school grade arithmetic puzzles. The puzzles in Zelda or the strategic challenge of Advance Wars both encourage a more useful kind of logical thinking than Brain Training requires. All Brain Training seems to do is rote-learning of basic arithmetic.

I teach my nieces and nephews French. At school, they learn to recite the numbers. They can count up from one, but they cannot translate simple random numbers. That’s just one example of how rote-learning does not work. It’s a dumb, boring and ineffective way to study.

I think we should applaud Nintendo for recognizing a role for their technology in the classroom – but surely our children deserve something better than this?