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Depending what's behind it, you may be able to shake some of that parenting guilt.Guilty of letting an electronic screen babysit your children?
Queensland University of Technology researchers from the Games Research and Interaction Design lab have released a paper looking at active versus passive screen time for young children, predominantly two to five-year-olds.
What they found was not all screen time should be considered equal and while government recommendations may advise just one hour of screen time for young children a day [and none for kids under two] it didn't take into account the difference between actively engaging in a screen activity and passively absorbing media.
“The major thing we had an issue with, with the government recommendations, was they treated all types of screen time as being equivalent,” Dr Penny Sweetser said.
“Whereas if you look at all the different activities which make up screen time, you could be TV viewing, using your computer, children doing their homework on a computer, reading a book using an electronic reader, playing video games on something like an iPad or engaging in physical games on something like an Xbox Kinect.”
The research team proposed screen time could be divided into at least two different types – passive, in which participants are sedentary and are passively exposed to media and active, in which participants are either cognitively or physically engaged with the media.
The researchers divided active screen time further – into cognitively and physically active screen time.
“For physically active games we found that they can actually be comparable to physical exercise - similar in intensity to light to moderate walking, skipping and jogging - and they actually have a host of other benefits," Dr Sweetser said.
"They can improve academic performance, social skills and self esteem, they can motivate young children to exercise and be more active in general and they can improve their academic performance,” Dr Sweetser said.
More specifically, video games had been linked to improved visual attention, problem solving, conductive reasoning, coordination and the tracking of multiple objects.“If we look in terms of cognitive reactive, there is actually quite a substantial body of research that illustrates the benefits of active screen times in terms of children's cognitive development. Dr Sweetser said some of that research associated computer use during school years with improvements in school readiness, cognitive development, helping to facilitate social interaction and language use improvements, such as word knowledge and verbal fluency.
So while Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja is not the worst way to distract a bored child or keep them quiet long enough to finish your coffee, Dr Sweetser still recommends parental interaction.
“You might want to consider playing with them and engaging with them and making sure that the content they are using is appropriate, that is it is providing them with some sort of educational stimulation,” she said.
Any day now, I will become a parent. To prepare, I’ve been looking at a lot of apps that claim to be educational and fun for children, but what I already know from being an uncle is that kids don’t care about those educational apps. They just want to play Angry Birds. The good news — depending on your definition of that, I guess — is that my experiences with my nephews has just been borne out by science. A new study shows that kids log more time play Rovio’sAngry Birds games than any educational games, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Angry Birds is a great primer for learning physics.
The study was done by Kytephone, a company that gives parents tools to turn their Android phone into a more kid-friendly device. They studied 13,000 kids between the ages of eight and 14 in more than 70 countries and found that Angry Birds Star Wars was the most popular game, probably because adding lightsabers to things inherently makes them more awesome. It’s joined in the top three by the original Angry Birds and Bad Piggies. The study wasn’t based on downloads, but rather on total time children spent playing each game.
Angry Birds is not an educational game, and when I say it’s a great primer for physics, I don’t mean to say that it teaches kids physics. I have a four-year-old nephew who loves playing Angry Birds, and he’s surprisingly good at it, but it’s not because he has a great understanding of potential energy, gravity, or force of impact. He just knows that if he makes a bird hit a pig hard enough, that pig will probably fall over and disappear.
When he gets older though, and he’s learning about things like potential energy, he could make the connection that the farther back he pulls on the slingshot in Angry Birds, the more potential energy he’s putting behind launching the bird. Being told that an Angry Bird travels along a parabolic trajectory could help him understand what those words mean. Playing Angry Birds Space won’t turn him into an astrophysicist. Could it help to spark his interest in the subject, though? Stranger things have happened
The other lesson to take here is that making a game educational doesn’t really do much if a child doesn’t want to play it. I think kids can learn a lot more from games that are actually fun to play as long as those games have at least a modicum of something educational about them — look at classics of the genre like Math Blasters and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?. One thing is for sure, though — nobody’s learning anything from Temple Run, which came in at number eight on Kytephone’s list.
