READ

Video Games can improve your mental maths!

Researchers gave more than 200 WA students video game consoles to play in the classroom – here’s what happened.
​Michelle Wheeler
​Michelle Wheeler
Freelance science journalist
Video Games can improve your mental maths!

It’s a finding that will be music to kids’ ears. Playing video games at school is good for your mental maths.

Researchers at Edith Cowan University gave students around Perth Nintendo DS consoles to play maths games on in the classroom.

The year 4 and 5 students – who temporarily swapped their regular maths lessons out for the games – were then tested a term later.

The results? The students using the games were faster and more accurate in their mental maths test.

Lead author Dr John O’Rourke and his colleague Dr Susan Main have been researching video games in schools for almost a decade.

John believes educational video games have a place in schools, as long as they’re used as a short-term intervention.

Close up of young student doing a maths game on a device
View Larger

A student uses the Nintendo DS in the study

A student uses the Nintendo DS in the study

Maths in 20 minutes

The research followed 10 classes, giving half Nintendo DS consoles loaded with Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training software.

The classes with the consoles played the video game for 20 minutes at the beginning of each day over a 10-week school term.

The classes without the consoles committed that time to their typical maths program.

While all of the classes improved their mental maths scores, the students who used the consoles gained more.

On a basic number test measuring their recall in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, the students with the consoles gained an average of 20 points over the term.

Those taught by traditional methods gained an average of four points.

The kids are busy, now what?

As part of the research the team interviewed teachers, students and a handful of parents about the intervention.

John says the teachers were generally pretty happy.

“65% of the comments were overwhelmingly positive,” he says.

“The biggest challenge we had was that the students didn’t want to stop at 20 minutes.”

The team also explored what the teachers did while the students played video games.

John says the really good teachers used the technology to its full potential, building classes around the use of the consoles.

“They saw how they could extend this,” he says.

“They spent appropriate time on getting the kids to strategise, getting the kids to feed back to the rest of the class.

“They had records of the week, most improved … they built stuff around it.”

View Larger

Maths is just one area where ‘gamification’ has the potential to improve learning outcomes.

Image credit: Getty
Maths is just one area where ‘gamification’ has the potential to improve learning outcomes.

Harnessing the novelty factor

International studies have shown video games can improve students’ skills in other areas of maths too, including algebra.

But despite the consoles’ success, John is cautious about introducing educational video games to the classroom.

He views video games as a tool that can be useful in short bursts, rather than something with the potential to replace regular teaching.

“It has to have that novelty aspect,” he says.

After the study, some of the schools requested the consoles when the students needed a quick refresh on skills such as their times tables or cumulative addition.

“That’s probably the way that I see it being used,” John says.

“In actual fact, I think it would be really boring if students used video games all the time.

“They have enough time on these away from school.”

Video games in schools should have a real purpose and strong structures around them and – ultimately – be fun, John says.

He believes video games should be treated as one of many tools at teachers’ disposal.

“My interest is not so much digital tools … but ways to engage and motivate students,” John says.

“And this is just another one.”

​Michelle Wheeler
About the author
​Michelle Wheeler
Michelle is a former science and environment reporter for The West Australian. Her work has seen her visit a snake-infested island dubbed the most dangerous in the world, test great white shark detectors in a tinny and meet isolated tribes in the Malaysian jungle. Michelle was a finalist for the Best Freelance Journalist at the 2020 WA Media Awards.
View articles
Michelle is a former science and environment reporter for The West Australian. Her work has seen her visit a snake-infested island dubbed the most dangerous in the world, test great white shark detectors in a tinny and meet isolated tribes in the Malaysian jungle. Michelle was a finalist for the Best Freelance Journalist at the 2020 WA Media Awards.
View articles

NEXT ARTICLE

We've got chemistry, let's take it to the next level!

Get the latest WA science news delivered to your inbox, every fortnight.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Republish

Creative Commons Logo

Republishing our content

We want our stories to be shared and seen by as many people as possible.

Therefore, unless it says otherwise, copyright on the stories on Particle belongs to Scitech and they are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This allows you to republish our articles online or in print for free. You just need to credit us and link to us, and you can’t edit our material or sell it separately.

Using the ‘republish’ button on our website is the easiest way to meet our guidelines.

Guidelines

You cannot edit the article.

When republishing, you have to credit our authors, ideally in the byline. You have to credit Particle with a link back to the original publication on Particle.

If you’re republishing online, you must use our pageview counter, link to us and include links from our story. Our page view counter is a small pixel-ping (invisible to the eye) that allows us to know when our content is republished. It’s a condition of our guidelines that you include our counter. If you use the ‘republish’ then you’ll capture our page counter.

If you’re republishing in print, please email us to let us so we know about it (we get very proud to see our work republished) and you must include the Particle logo next to the credits. Download logo here.

If you wish to republish all our stories, please contact us directly to discuss this opportunity.

Images

Most of the images used on Particle are copyright of the photographer who made them.

It is your responsibility to confirm that you’re licensed to republish images in our articles.

Video

All Particle videos can be accessed through YouTube under the Standard YouTube Licence.

The Standard YouTube licence

  1. This licence is ‘All Rights Reserved’, granting provisions for YouTube to display the content, and YouTube’s visitors to stream the content. This means that the content may be streamed from YouTube but specifically forbids downloading, adaptation, and redistribution, except where otherwise licensed. When uploading your content to YouTube it will automatically use the Standard YouTube licence. You can check this by clicking on Advanced Settings and looking at the dropdown box ‘License and rights ownership’.
  2. When a user is uploading a video he has license options that he can choose from. The first option is “standard YouTube License” which means that you grant the broadcasting rights to YouTube. This essentially means that your video can only be accessed from YouTube for watching purpose and cannot be reproduced or distributed in any other form without your consent.

Contact

For more information about using our content, email us: particle@scitech.org.au

Copy this HTML into your CMS
Press Ctrl+C to copy