I sat down and did the work. It's like becoming a great tennis player. You have to train and train and train and train.

First you have to WANT to do the work, and then you have to want it enough to achieve a freakish level of focus on the work.

I don't see how achieving a freakish level of focus on video gaming is ever going to make someone good at math.

The time they're spending becoming good at video games is time they're NOT spending learning math.

There seems to be a bit of magical thinking going on here. You can't become good at math without actually doing math.

Video games are not magic. They don't teach you calculus or differential geometry in your sleep.

I was a tetris (and hextris, and the freaky 3-d tetris that Sega had) in high school and college. I couldn't get ninto all the d&d fantasy games, or the car chase games, or the shoot-em-up games, but Tetris, etc really cleared my head.

And, of course, it's all about manipulating objects into spatial patterns.

The women I know who are gamers like World of Warcraft and Halo, not Barbie's Adventure or whatever. They may market total crap to us, but that doesn't mean we're going to buy it.

good news about girls and women!

Can't help but imagine the "Animal Doctor" game is to help train women to assist boys or something, since boys often act like animals.

(it's a joke)

I thought the study implied that "spatial abilities" would improve with video game training, not math skills.

I get frustrated by articles that tout the beneficial effects of "video games," but don't invest a dozen more words in identifying the game in question, or even what kind it was. If spatial skills are affected, then I assume it's either some kind of 3D action-type thing (the aforementioned Halo, for instance), or else a moving-geometry game like Tetris or a Tetris descendant.

It probably wasn't Barbie (thank God) -- so what was it? Which games are the spatial skill enhancers, and which are just enjoyable time-wasters?

"On average, women are not quite as good at rapidly switching attention among different objects and this may be one reason why women do not do as well on spatial tasks. But more important than finding that difference, our second experiment showed that both men and women can improve their spatial skills by playing a video game and that the women catch up to the men."

How long before they do the groundbreaking study that shows that 4 year olds of both genders have similar levels of spatial awareness, and come to the earth shattering and completely counter-intuitive conclusion that maybe the male undergraduates had better spatial skills because they've been playing the games for 15-20 years at the time the study started.

Beth Israel did a study back in '04 or '05 that found that surgeons who played at least three hours worth of video games a week were 27% faster and made 37% fewer mistakes than their non-playing counterparts. Google it if you like, the story was carried by a host of media outlets.

This should come as no surprise to anyone. Video games, as a truly interactive (as opposed to television's strictly passive form) entertainment medium, force you to think. They enhance logical reasoning, memory, spatial perception, and a variety of other key problem-solving skills. Plus, they're just damn fun.

Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault

It would have to be something like a First Person Shooter if they wanted to improved spatial abilities. Apparently they had a control group playing a "non action game".

It's sort of like neural nets but it uses a taser to provide feedback.

Does anyone want to go through the tedious exercise of finding the Broadsheet posts that say "video games - yay!" and the ones that say "video games - oppressive!" and the ones that say "video game designers - oppressive!" and the ones that say "pixar - oppressive!"

Ah, it's a Friday, time I see for three quick posts and then off to happy hour with the grrlz.

Professor Ian Spence, one of the study's researchers, believes this could be key in "helping to attract more women to the mathematical sciences and engineering."

1. None of the major math and physics geniuses I know have ever played video games or ever displayed any interest in playing video games.

2. As American children have spent increasing time playing video games, they've been showing decreasing interest in careers in math and science.

That's why we have to import a huge chunk of our math and science talent from countries where the kids didn't have access to video games when they were growing up and instead endured very strict instruction in formal mathematics.

One thing I've wondered about is why certain spatial abilities women demonstrate aren't talked about more. Most of the needle arts (quilts particularly) require pretty good spatial skills, yet we always hear how the spatial tasks are in male-dominated fields. Pottery also strikes me as a very spatial activity. Plus I know that in tests my husband has higher spatial abilities than I do; but he can't pack a car efficiently or rearrange the 'fridge to hold extra groceries. Something's odd in how we test/think about spatial skills.

Are spatial abilities and math related? I can certainly see it for geometry and calculus, but algebra and simpler math don't strike me as particularly spatial.

A data analyst and a big part of my job it is to find patterns in lots of data. Tetris, sudoku, free cell, bejewled and other games/puzzles of that sort have been very helpful in keeping those skills up. It doesn't have to be large amounts of time, certainly I think that kids should be out running around and getting some physical exercise, but mental excercise is needed too. The eye to brain to hand connection needed in some of these games is pretty important. Playing a good game of tetris or completing a complicated sudoku puzzle is a lot better waste of time than another viewing of High School Musical.