Your kids flop down in front of the television and flick on their video game system. As they reach for their joysticks, your motherly sonar goes off -- video games are a waste of time and they rot your child's brain. Or do they? According to some scientists and academics, video games can actually make you smarter. No kidding! The strategic thinking and problem solving involved in video games makes them good learning machines. While there's no substitute for classroom learning or curling up with a book, video games challenge and workout the brain in different ways. Here's how:


How a Video Game Works. Most kids would rather play a video game than do their homework. Little do they know, they're giving their brain a good workout while exercising their thumbs on a joystick. Navigating their way through a mysterious virtual world, kids must figure out the rules of the game and the goals they need to achieve to win. For hours they work at solving a series of puzzles that are nested inside one another like a collapsed telescope. Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, calls this "telescoping." Gamers must deal with immediate problems while keeping their long-term goals on their horizon. "Probing" refers to the strategic thinking and complex problem solving of video games, according to James Paul Gee, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Gee says that playing a video game is similar to working through a science problem. Like students in a laboratory, gamers must come up with a hypothesis. For example, the hidden treasure is in the castle. They engage in an action by hunting for the treasure. Gamers discover if their hypothesis is true or false when they search the castle. If they don't find the treasure, they revise their hypothesis the next time they play. Video games are goal-driven experiences, says Gee, which are fundamental to learning.

How The Brain Learns. Brain imaging studies have shown that the brain can change with practice, says Dr. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, co-author of The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education. This is called brain plasticity. Train yourself to do a certain task, and the part of your brain involved in the task can actually grow in size and activity, says Blakemore. A recent scientific study found that people who use their brain a lot have a 46 per cent decreased risk of developing dementia, says Blakemore. Playing video games is like learning a kind of new visual language, writes James Paul Gee in his book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Players must figure out what each element in a video game is, and how it is used to play the game. Unlike reading a book passively, playing a video game is all about active exploration. Video games force your brain to make decisions, writes author Steven Johnson. While reading may activate the imagination, Johnson asserts that games help your brain learn how to think by forcing you to weigh evidence, analyze situations, consult your long-term goals and make a decision. As Johnson points out, it's not what you're thinking about when you play a video game, it's the way you're thinking that challenges your brain.

Video Games Make Learning Fun. Ask any kid. Playing a video game is way more fun than learning your times tables. This is because a game offers rewards. It's the reward system of video games that has a powerful hold over the brain, says author Steven Johnson. Find the hidden treasure, and win the game. Kids also get to create their own adventure, navigating where they want to go and what they're searching for. "It becomes their story," says education professor James Paul Gee. "It's their accomplishment. They're competing against themselves." Playing in the safety of their own home also avoids kids' fears of making mistakes in front of a classroom of other kids. "Failure works differently in video games," says Gee. "The cost of failure is lower, which encourages risk-taking and exploration." If kids get the answer wrong and their character dies, they just start the game over and try again
While the benefits of playing video games should be nothing new to astute gamers, surveys and studies are still being conducted seemingly all the time on this subject.

The latest report on the benefits of gaming comes from Sony Online Entertainment (which, I mean come on, how is this impartial?). The results, published in the latest issue of Family Circle magazine, suggests parents are seeing improvements in hand/eye coordination, problem solving, and typing skills since their children have started playing video games.

In addition, games are apparently creating little Enders, by teaching children to think strategically. The report states that the majority of video games require players to follow rules, think tactically, make fast decisions and fulfill numerous objectives to win. This resonates with the 70 percent of the parents surveyed who have seen their children's problem-solving skills improve since they started playing video games.

Other key survey findings from the survey:


Most (75 percent) of respondents have attributed educational value and improved hand/eye coordination to video game usage.
84 percent of respondents reported an increase in their child's typing skills from playing PC/online games.
72 percent of respondents say their kids play games online with other people sometimes or all the time.
87 percent of parents who participated in the survey are spending time playing video games with their children.
More than 80 percent of respondents say their children play video games in a common area of the house (i.e. family/living room or computer room).

Yahoo's Web site, Shine, which purportedly reaches 10 million women each month, hosted the survey throughout June 2008.

Like I said, this is nothing new. Many studies have been promoting the benefits of gaming for years. I'm just waiting for the day it's no longer an issue. Speaking of education value, I was practically raised by video games, and look at me. I wrote good, don't me?

You've got a nack for copying and pasting others work. On the topic of discussion, I think video games are in the most part good for you. When I have kids someday, Im certainly going to let them play video games.

Closed for copy pasting others work.