For more information, please contact media LEGO. About Brian Crecente An award-winning journalist, Brain Crecente spent nearly 25 years covering the video game industry. He helped found Kotaku, co-founded Polygon, and ran video game coverage for both Rolling Stone and Variety. He currently runs consulting company Pad and Pixel. It can really make a difference.
The researchers examined hundreds of students and found a huge difference in their spatial skills with scores ranging from between six and 75 per cent correct responses on a written, spatial-knowledge test. The team then set about trying to explain why there was such a difference in results in the tests. For the study, carried out at University of Colorado at Boulder, students in the took part in a multiple-choice questions that required them to mentally rotate obscure shapes, for example, or visualise an object's cross section.
But let's not overlook the additional lessons games have to teach children. For example:. Which of us hasn't skipped blithely through a video game tutorial, only to discover later we have no idea how to perform a simple operation?
I once spent 15 minutes stuck in a corridor in Gears of War because I couldn't do a combat roll. Although to be fair, I was incredibly drunk. As all Guardian-reading parents will know, praising your child isn't trendy these days. It's better to point out that the kid's drawing skills are improving generally, because they're working at them. This is video games in a nutshell, innit. When I first played Tomb Raider, I couldn't walk more than four steps without plunging into a ravine. Three hours later, I was lining up jumps with pixel precision, and doing swan dives off waterfalls.
Games teach us that the more you do something, the better you get at it. You can't really fail at Lego. But video games are all about failing - getting shot, missing the goal, plunging into the ravine, etc. They teach you how to lose.
What's more, they demonstrate that the best thing to do is to get up and try again, until you win. Of course, the try again thing doesn't always apply. Don't know about you, but the stack of games I have failed to complete is a lot bigger than the pile of ones I've finished.
I'm OK with that. Video games have taught me that with so much choice out there, there's no point wasting your time on something particularly hard, boring, or annoying. This is relevant to so much in life, from bad relationships and crap jobs to making your own gnocchi. Messing up is never final in video games. Sure, you might have to start over, sometimes from the very beginning.
But just like in real life, there's always the option to have another go. Unless you are literally dead. So there you go, Fogle. Stuff Lego, with its 65 year legacy of entertaining literally billions of children. Forget the fact they do a whole range of products designed to promote creativity, and that nowhere in the kit instructions does it say you can't use the bits to make other things.
I suggest you throw all your kids' Lego in the bin, along with the money you got paid for being a Lego brand ambassador , and get yourself some good old fashioned video games.
Or, you know, just accept that children don't always like the stuff we want them to like. It's true that toys shouldn't be about making kids conform. But that includes conforming to an idealistic vision of how children should spend their time. Above all, toys should be fun.
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