There comes a point in every adult’s life when they’ll need to pack the trunk of the car so tightly that it seems impossible. Even though the game isn’t particularly text-heavy, the level of focused attention that it demands helped shape the kids' brains towards the work of reading. At the end of 12 total hours, they found that the Rayman group displayed a marked increase in reading speed with no loss in comprehension or accuracy. Italian researchers conducted a study with two groups of dyslexic children – one played a slow-paced game and the other played Rayman Raving Rabbids for the Wii.
A study from a few years back indicates that playing fast-paced action video games may stimulate reading ability in children with dyslexia. Obviously nothing teaches reading like books, but if you’re worried that screen time is damaging your kid’s ability to process written language, that’s not really the case. If you want, try to open conversations with your kids after they play about some of these things and see how well they grasp the concepts.
No, these are normal, fun video games that just happen to pack a payload of transferrable real-world skills. We’re not talking about “edutainment” titles here. Budgeting, planning, effective communication and more are all mental abilities that electronic games can strengthen.
Gaming is a small but significant part of their lives, and they’re extremely physically active and engaged in their community, but even though I’ve been playing computer games since I was in kindergarten, there’s still a little twinge there.īut video game playing can actually help kids learn essential life skills that they might not be picking up in school or from their parents. It’s a little “tiger mom” of me, but sometimes when my kids are playing video games I can’t help thinking of the time that they’re wasting. Money management and engineering are two of them.