The impact of mind game playing on children' s reasoning abilities: reflections from an experience

The paper aims at contributing to the understanding of whether digital games can be considered suitable and effective tools for enhancing learning. It thus aims at providing grounds for reflecting if their school use can provide a significant added value with respect to traditional school activities. The paper draws on a longterm research experience carried out in primary schools with the specific aim of studying the impact of the use of mind games (puzzles, brain teasers...) on children's reasoning abilities and problem solving skills. Early activities in this field at primary school level, appear to be particularly important since reasoning and problem solving abilities are universally acknowledged to be "key skills", transversal to any kind of learning and there are grounds for believing that improving such abilities will impact on the global school achievement. The hypothesis that a teacher driven and well focused use of carefully selected mind games can have a positive impact on students' reasoning abilities is put forward. A number of reflections and observations are outlined, based on both the analysis of the quantitative results of students' performance and on the teachers' opinion on the impact of the experimental activities on pupils' school achievement. From a quantitative point of view, the results of a standardized test carried out at national level, revealed, in fact, that students who had undergone three years of experimental activities with games, performed better at the mathematics test (which also included logic items) with respect to those of two matched classes. Such results also showed that high achiever students seemed to have benefited from the work with games more than low achievers. Beside the encouraging test results, from a more qualitative standpoint, personal opinions and individual findings of the school teachers involved in the project seem to confirm that, following the extensive use of logical games, positive effects were observed both on the students' attitude towards learning and on their global school performance.