[Written By External Partner]
At all school levels, students face different challenges. Still, one of the biggest things holding them back from academic success is a lack of focus and concentration.
According to numerous studies, a large proportion of students have difficulty maintaining focus during their studies. This issue is particularly urgent today. Statistics show that the average attention span before the 2000s was 12 seconds. After 2000, it started to decline rapidly. Now this indicator is at 8.25 seconds. And this has a significant impact on the ability of modern students to stay focused.
One way students deal with this problem is by resorting to professional academic help. Today, you can turn to a professional helper like WritePaper to complete your assignments even when your concentration is at its lowest. This service helps students achieve success in any situation. However, there is something else that can also help. It may surprise you, but they are mobile games.
How does gaming affect a person’s brain?
To understand the benefits of mobile games for student focus, it is first important to discover the effect of gaming on the brain.
An interesting study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience reveals the answer. For this study, researchers invited 29 male students from the University of Electronic Science and Technology in China.
Specialists divided all participants into two groups:
- Experts – Youngsters with at least 2 years of gaming experience who are in the League of Legends top 7% of players.
- Non-experts – Youngsters with less than half a year of experience who fall in the League of Legends lowest 11% of players.
Researchers studied the brain activity of participants from both groups before and after playing the League of Legends. The main aim of the study was to assess their selective attention. Human visual selective attention is the brain’s ability to focus on relevant visual data and suppress less relevant information. In a nutshell, a person with such an ability can use their brain more effectively. They can focus on relevant information or tasks and block distractions.
The first scan showed that expert participants had better visual selective attention than non-experts. When young people were asked to play League of Legends for an hour, the scan found that participants from both groups had higher brain activity associated with selective attention.
The results suggest that short periods of playing such games (whether on desktop or mobile) can significantly improve one’s ability to concentrate and prevent distraction. So if you were wondering if mobile games can improve student focus, the answer is yes.
It has been scientifically proven that such experiences affect brain activity. It stimulates selective visual attention. So it also has a positive influence on one’s academic abilities. But even that is not all.
The effect of mobile games on student engagement
A lack of involvement affects the ability to focus. If you’re not interested in doing anything, your brain will procrastinate and be distracted by something more interesting. And that’s another case where mobile games can help.
One of the main reasons for introducing gamification in the classroom is to increase student engagement. Several mobile games are bright, dynamic and offer interesting gameplay. Needless to say, all these things make them incredibly attractive to users. Therefore, by using them as an educational resource, we can significantly improve student engagement and increase their focus on classroom activities.
In addition, modern games often have different social characteristics. They create a strong community of insiders and allow users to challenge each other, track their progress and show this process to their friends. Such features create a sense of competition, which makes the process even more exciting.
Taking advantage of this phenomenon in the educational landscape, educators are creating more sophisticated classroom activities that keep young people engaged. By making them more involved, respectively, we also make them more focused on the process.
How mobile games affect students’ memory
If we study the positive effects of mobile gaming technology in education, we can learn one more thing. Such activities do not only affect the concentration of young people. They also affect their memory. Thanks to advanced graphics and immersive audio, such apps are packed with various stimuli. And experts claim that these stimuli have a positive effect on the brain’s ability to receive, process and retain information.
In the virtual world, players often have to deal with multiple tasks and goals at once. This spikes the work of your brain’s hippocampus — the part responsible for turning short-term memories into long-term memories. By training this part of the brain through play, students can improve their memory.
This fact is also supported by science. The researchers at the University of California studied the work of the hippocampus in people who don’t play at all or play 2D games and in people who play in 3D. The study revealed a significantly better outcome in hippocampus-related memory tasks in 3D gamers. According to the report, just 30 minutes of play a day improves students’ memory and helps keep their brains sharp. But even that is not all.
Another study from the University of California-Irvine also revealed the positive effect of mobile games on memory formation as a whole. Young people who engage in such activities score higher on several memory tests that require the use of the hippocampus. They can form memories more effectively. So this is another positive effect of gaming on students.
Types of games proven to boost focus and concentration
Games thus have a number of positive effects. They stimulate brain activity, engagement and memory. But are all games the same? The answer is no. Different activities stimulate different skills.
Among the different types of games, specialists note the following that have the best effect on one’s focus and concentration:
- First person shooter. First and foremost, studies reveal the positive influence of first-person shooters like Titanfall or Battlefield. They require excellent hand-eye coordination, strategy and attention to detail. Thus, they have been proven to boost focus and cognitive skills.
- Strategy. Various strategy games like Civilization or Starcraft have also been proven to increase focus. Strategies require you to stay 100% focused on making quick decisions and adapting quickly to change.
- Simulation. All kinds of mobile simulations (which are very popular) also have a positive influence on your focus. Apart from this, simulations teach players decision-making and other real-world skills.
- Mass effect. This type of game usually has multiple storylines and endings. Every action and decision of the player thus affects the results. And it is also believed to improve focus.
- Action adventure. Such mobile apps also boost focus. They require quick thinking, reacting and solving problems. They also often require experimentation, creativity and teamwork.
It comes down to
As you may know, a lack of focus and concentration can seriously harm one’s performance in school. But now you also know that playing mobile games can improve both.
Such activities have been proven to boost students’ brain activity, engagement, and memory, and encourage the development of multiple critical skills. So if you were hesitant about the role of gamification in education, you already have the proof.
0 Comments