Comments on: Video Games make you better at Math

By: Jesper

Jesper — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:40:18 +0000

Gazza8, what I meant was the simple fact that it was a study with a falsifiable hypothesis.

By: gazza8

gazza8 — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:10:52 +0000

@ Jesper: You wrote “The reason I find your study interesting is that you set it up properly so that it could potentially disprove the idea that video games were good for learning”.

I’m a french native speaker, and I don’t master every subtlety in english ;-)
So, I don’t understand why you write that this study “could potentially disprove” that video games are good for learning.
Actually, my question is: in which extent does this study disprove this (good for all gamers that we are) idea?

By: Derek Robertson

Derek Robertson — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:14:24 +0000

@ bingo. Have a look at the blog post that has a link to the summary report that we have released. I take your point to some degree about not sharing the data but if we do then it will never appear in a peer reviewed journal and this is something that we really hope will happen. I wish that I could share everything at this stage just to let you see exactly how good the results were. Did you look at the graph for increase in quickness of calculation? I cannot understand how anyone involved in education could fail to see the impact that this intervention has had in this area. It was a large effect size in fact. Hopefully you can wait a little while before the full study is published. Apologies again for not making everything available at this stage.

By: bingo

bingo — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:35:49 +0000

Anybody else feel that those graphs are disingenuous? Four data points isn’t much. If one has the data, then show it; the trend line should be the icing, not the cake.

Maybe the data is protected or something, but it doesn’t leave a good feeling…

By: Derek Robertson

Derek Robertson — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:57:09 +0000

Thanks for that Jesper.

By: Jesper

Jesper — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:14:38 +0000

Ah, the question mark was meant in earnest: As someone who is a big fan of video games, I really like to hear good news about them – this makes me worry about being too keen to agree with everything that confirms my (positive) assumptions about video games. That was the meaning of the question mark.

The reason I find your study interesting is that you set it up properly so that it could potentially disprove the idea that video games were good for learning. That makes it extra interesting.

By: Derek Robertson

Derek Robertson — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:07:38 +0000

Why the question mark at the end of your post Jesper?