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By Bob Little (January 2008 Issue)
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In June last year, the Australian-born, awardwinning actress Nicole Kidman turned 40. While the popular view is that that is an age at which life begins, some neuroscientists maintain that it is the age at which the brain begins to decay – unless it is kept active.

Both hemispheres of the human brain are divided into four parts: the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes. The prefrontal region, which makes up a large part of the frontal lobe, is the foundation of creativity, memory, communication and self-control. The prefrontal cortex determines how you use stored knowledge in practical situations. That means that your ’practical intelligence’, or ability to apply stored knowledge to your everyday reality, depends upon how well your prefrontal cortex functions.

So, television viewers have seen Ms Kidman keeping her brain in trim, via a Nintendo DS hand-held game system, by playing ‘Brain Age’ – one of the 3,000 or so games currently available for the Nintendo family of products: Nintendo DS, Wii, Game Boy, Nintendo Gamecube and Wi-Fi.

Inspired by the work of prominent Japanese neuroscientist Dr Ryuta Kawashima, the Brain Age games feature activities designed to help stimulate your brain and give it the workout it needs. The game, which claims to determine your ‘brain age’ – ideally, as near to 20 as you can get – it features 17 activities, such as solving simple maths problems, counting currency, drawing pictures on the Nintendo DS touch screen, unscrambling letters and playing ‘rock, paper, scissors’.

According to Nintendo: “Brain Age is based on the premise that cognitive exercise can improve blood flow to the brain. All it takes is as little as a few minutes of play time a day. For everyone who spends all their play time at the gym working out the major muscle groups, don’t forget – your brain is like a muscle, too. And it craves exercise.”

Dr Elizabeth Zelinski, dean and executive director of University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, has said that games such as this can help to keep older generations’ minds active.

Playing games has always helped to keep us fit and active – both physically and mentally. The difference today is that technology makes it possible to play games by ourselves, with or against the game-delivering technology. This can remove the need to join sports clubs, find partners and/or opponents and so on. We merely have to buy the game and the technology, plug it in and begin playing – or, if you prefer, training our brains.

In addition to games for hand-held devices such as the Nintendo DS, there are tests for cognitive and affective, as well as psychomotor, skills via the Wii – such as the MySims game, where players build a town, shape the community and, among other things, develop interpersonal skills.

Then there are computer-delivered virtual reality and other simulations. Among the corporate learning community – especially in the UK, with the launch, last year, of the Serious Games Institute at Coventry University – there is increasing interest in exploring how technology can be used to deliver learning via specially devised simulations and virtual reality scenarios, such as those offered by Forterra and Linden Labs.

According to Ron Edwards, who has been implementing performance-based learning solutions for more than 15 years and is the CEO of Ambient Performance, “The involvement of Nintendo DS (or Wii), Sony Home/PSP and Microsoft Xbox in the formal learning space is nearly non-existent.

“These are closed platforms, kit to develop learning software for which is – or was – restricted or just too costly. While this is finally starting to change, these organisations are not showing significant interest in the ‘serious games’ movement and seem to see the market as too small, in contrast to commercial game development, to get involved with the community to understand what’s needed.

“As an example, while the Sony PSP team in Europe has become more supportive of school use of the devices, they have not listened to developers who have made simple requests to make the platform more conducive to the use of Flash and memory stick-based learning resources.

“In spite of all this, there is a vibrant community of learning and teaching professionals who are hard at work trying to use these platforms to deliver innovative, fun and effective learning experiences. A little help would go a long way.

“Hopefully, the huge success of Nintendo DS Brain Training – with some eight million copies sold to date, I believe – will be a catalyst to develop more educational titles which are useful on their own yet still compelling.”

The availability of pornography and gambling helped to popularise the internet ten years ago. Could learning materials be doing the same thing for today’s new technology?

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