Nintendo Brain Games Effectiveness Questioned 63
nandemoari writes "While Nintendo boasts that its Wii can make you fit, the game company's popular line of DS 'Brain Games' have for some time promised to make kids smarter by challenging them with word puzzles and math formulas. However, a French professor isn't buying the shtick. University of Rennes professor Alain Lieury, a cognitive psychology specialist in Brittany, France, recently studied a group of ten-year-old children playing a variety of mentally-challenging games. Not all were video games, however; Lieury pitted more traditional games (including sudoku, Scrabble, and regular old reading and homework) against Nintendo's popular line of DS hits, including Brain Age, Big Brain Academy, and Brain Training. Although he credits the Nintendo DS — one of the best selling consoles of all-time — as 'a technological jewel,' he finds Nintendo's claim that it can actually help kids learn is nothing more than pure 'charlatanism.'"
Re:so "go bust" means... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes.
For example.
"I'ma bust two caps 'n your ass!"
means
"A professor of cognitive psychology is going to make this your unhappy day."
kids mental years (Score:3, Funny)
Did the kids reduce their mental age as they kept playing?
Does the game end when you finally become your father?
Can you keep playing, going further back, generation after feneration until one day you reach the mental age of primordial ooze in it's adolescence?
By that time you should be solving the sudokus before the ds has had time to display them. And instead of simple drawinngs, they are n-dimensional matrices that replace numbers with string theories and emotional states.
Re:Wasn't there an identical study in Great Britai (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not meant to make kids smarter (Score:4, Funny)