Playing Smarter in a Digital World: A Guide to Choosing and Using Popular Video Games and Apps to Improve Executive Functioning in Children and Teens

Child psychologist Randy Kulman, PhD, has worked with challenging youth for more than 25 years. Author of Train Your Brain for Success: A Teenager’s Guide to Executive Functioning (2012), Kulman designed a Web site called LearningWorks for Kids that promotes the use of games and applications (apps) for the development of children’s executive functioning skills (2013). A companion text to the Web site published this year, Playing Smarter in a Digital World, offers practical, sympathetic advice for parents and other caregivers that addresses concerns about selecting appropriate games, limiting screen time, and participating in children’s gaming lives. As Kulman recognizes in this helpful paperback, many parents are concerned about the amount of time their children spend online or using apps, and yet parents provide their children with the latest tablet or game because they feel these may offer educational and social advantages. At the same time, parents are also worried that games and other online activities may actually do more cognitive harm than good, but, lacking clear guidance about how to select games and apps, they feel helpless to advise their children. Kulman’s thoughtful guide not only gives parents the information they need to promote digital responsibility, he also explores the positive role games and apps can play in improving children’s cognitive skills. His key argument starts from the premise that digital games can teach 21st century skills that children need to master for success. Kulman featured his new book at the 10th Annual Games for Health Conference (convened by Ben Sawyer and Beth Bryant of Digital Mill in Boston, MA, June 2014). The author focuses on a pragmatic approach to what he calls the ‘‘play diet,’’ a concept delineated in several chapters of Playing Smarter in a Digital World. Not unlike the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s ‘‘Choose My Plate,’’ the ‘‘play diet’’ seeks to balance competing needs: Social play, active play, creative play, free play, and digital play. Ideally, a balanced ‘‘play diet’’ would include outdoor classic games such as Capture the Flag and traditional family-focused board games, but, Kulman avers, we should also understand that ‘‘SuperMario’’ and ‘‘The Legend of Zelda’’ are part of the current digital landscape, and we should include them in the ‘‘play diet’’ within reasonable limits. Kulman directly confronts this thorny issue of setting limits. Based on his study of 500 families’ attitudes toward digital media use as well as his related field studies, Kulman addresses the many ways in which parents set limits on technology and screen time. He outlines the range of options from ‘‘never’’ to ‘‘1 hour a day’’ to the lenient ‘‘no limits’’ and explains how parents can effectively guide their children in maintaining balance in their ‘‘play diet.’’ A realist, he also has suggestions such as keeping the router in the parents’ bedroom in case the Internet connection just needs to go to sleep at 9 p.m. in order to enforce limits for a child who cannot set his or her own. Kulman’s advocacy for gaming as a healthy part of children’s play is predicated on his findings regarding the relationship between specific games and the development of specific executive function skills. The first third of this 19chapter book discusses in general what his research shows games can do to help children learn. It is in this section that he introduces his term the ‘‘Learning Quotient’’ (LQ), which is a score given to a game that represents the sum of a ‘‘Brain Score’’ and a ‘‘Fun Score’’; the LQ is intended to help parents and educators assess a particular game’s or app’s appropriateness for a specific child. To make this information more accessible, he has created a table, included in the reference section, using the LQ, that scores a variety of games and apps and catalogues the skills targeted in each game such as planning, working memory, flexibility, and self-awareness. The book then refers back to the Web site, where the reader can find more about the LQ. The second third of the book articulates how games can improve specific developing brain functions; the final section