Research Friday Week 1

I checked out a website called progno.com

On a list of 32 games about half were education related. The rest involved being creative in some way (like creating your own fish tank), or were matching games (such as memory). The few true games I did see were: Hungry Caterpillar (you grow your caterpillar by feeding it); Checkers; Tic-Tac-Toe; A crystal ball game called "The wizard game" (its basically the eight-ball Y/N/maybe question ball you find at Spencer Gifts); and a maze game were you try to find your way through a maze.

Category % of games on site

Creativity 15%

Educational 56%

Misc 21%

There are a ton of links to games like "Free Math Blaster" or "Free Reading blaster"

So obviously the focus is on Education during those extremely forgetful adolescent years.

There's a cool kids website called gamescene.com that has a lot of kids games that are not educational. Its nothing ground breaking, though, and of course there isn't much complexity in the games either. Although, I've always loved missile command.

Apparently, developers have concluded that children between the ages of 9 -12 do not yet have the necessary reasoning and problem solving skills that would allow them to play a moderately sophisticated strategy game.

This excerpt is taken from http://allpsych.com/psychology101/development.html

A website devoted to Psychology and is a virtual Psychology classroom.

Preoperational Stage. The second stage begins after Object Permanency is achieved and occurs between the ages of two to seven years of age. During this stage, the development of language occurs at a rapid pace. Children learn how to interact with their environment in a more complex manner through the use of words and images. This stage is marked by Egocentrism, or the child’s belief that everyone sees the world the same way that she does. The fail to understand the differences in perception and believe that inanimate objects have the same perceptions they do, such as seeing things, feeling, hearing and their sense of touch.

A second important factor in this stage is that of Conservation, which is the ability to understand that quantity does not change if the shape changes. In other words, if a short and wide glass of water is poured into a tall and thin glass. Children in this stage will perceive the taller glass as having more water due only because of it’s height. This is due to the children’s inability to understand reversibility and to focus on only one aspect of a stimulus (called centration), such as height, as opposed to understanding other aspects, such as glass width.

Concrete Operations Stage. Occurring between ages 7 and about 12, the third stage of cognitive development is marked by a gradual decrease in centristic thought and the increased ability to focus on more than one aspect of a stimulus. They can understand the concept of grouping, knowing that a small dog and a large dog are still both dogs, or that pennies, quarters, and dollar bills are part of the bigger concept of money.

They can only apply this new understanding to concrete objects ( those they have actually experienced). In other words, imagined objects or those they have not seen, heard, or touched, continue to remain somewhat mystical to these children, and abstract thinking has yet to develop.

Formal Operations Stage. In the final stage of cognitive development (from age 12 and beyond), children begin to develop a more abstract view of the world. They are able to apply reversibility and conservation to both real and imagined situations. They also develop an increased understanding of the world and the idea of cause and effect. By the teenage years, they are able to develop their own theories about the world. This stage is achieved by most children, although failure to do so has been associated with lower intelligence.