Searching for fun activities for your kids this summer? In addition to their daily 15 minutes of Smartick Method, we recommend playing brain training games in Smartick Virtual World to help train memory, attention, flexibility, reasoning, and more.
Brain training, also known as cognitive training or neurobics, has a similar function to exercises you might do to improve physical fitness. In this case, however, you’re training your mind! For example, just as you might do push-ups to improve your arm strength, you might play an attention brain game to improve your multitasking.
Game designers and neuropsychologists at Smartick have worked together to develop the games in Smartick Brain to specifically target and train certain cognitive functions. Smartick Brain Games are fun and beneficial.
Here are some examples of games that might help your child’s memory, attention, reasoning and inhibitory control.
Memory
Like the name suggests, this game challenges a player’s memory. The player must click on two facedown cards within the grid to see if the cards are a match. If they are not, the cards return to their facedown position and the player must choose two more. If the cards are a match, they stay faceup and the player continues searching for other matches. The strategy of this game requires remembering which cards the player has already clicked on and where the matching cards are. As the player progresses through the levels, Smartick makes this game even harder by shifting the cards up a row or right a column. This additional challenge puts the player’s memory and attention to the test.
Rush Hour
Smartick puts a fun twist on the classic game, in which the player must figure out how to get the red car out of the parking lot, in the fewest moves possible, by moving the other cars and trucks out of the way. This task challenges the player’s reasoning skills because they must map out possible paths, consider the different sizes of the vehicles, and decide how to do it all in the least number of moves.
Crying Wolf
In this game, hay bales appear on the screen; when the player clicks on the hay bale, they must decide as fast as possible if the animal they see is a sheep or a wolf (or even a wolf dressed as a sheep!). If the animal is a sheep, they click on it again and the sheep goes inside the pen. If it is a wolf, they must refrain from clicking until the wolf has wandered off the screen. This game requires both sustained attention and inhibitory control, because the player is watching the screen attentively and must also control their impulse to click on the animal until after they’ve determined what it is.
At Smartick, we’ve created these fun activities to entertain your children and improve their cognitive functions. Research shows that brain training games can help students have better memory, reasoning, flexibility, and attention [1,2]. These are abilities that may also help your children’s math skills [3].
Have your kids spend their summer playing games that might also help their academic success in the coming school year!
- Brehmer, Y., Westerberg, H., & Bäckman, L. (2012). Working-memory training in younger and older adults: training gains, transfer, and maintenance. Front Hum Neurosci., 6(63), 1-7.
- Nouchi, R., Yasukyuki, T., Takeuchi, H., Hashizume, H., Nozawa, T., Kambara, T., … Kawashima, R. (2013). Brain Training Game Boosts Executive Functions, Working Memory and Processing Speed in the Young Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial. PLoS ONE, 8(2).
- Wexler, B. E., Iseli, M., Leon, S., Zaggle, W., Rush, C., Goodman, A., Imal, A. E., & Bo, E. (2016). Cognitive Priming and Cognitive Training: Immediate and Far Transfer to Academic Skills in Children. Nature: Scientific Reports 6 (32859), 1-9.
Learn More:
- Exercising Memory with SmartickBrain Games
- Educational Games on SmartickBrain, Essential for Learning
- Cognitive Flexibility Games with SmartickBrain
- Lost Objects: The New SmartickBrain Game to Train Attention
- Reasoning Games to Improve Mathematics
In her free time she enjoys cooking, running, and working with children.