Kids can learn a lot by playing games. In this episode I talk with Dr. Jennifer Blessing about the skills that children learn by playing games, such as turn taking, goal setting, and number sense.
Ramani, G. B., & Siegler, R. S. (2008). Promoting broad and stable improvements in low‐income children’s numerical knowledge through playing number board games. Child development, 79(2), 375-394.
Hi all! Just wanted to give a quick update on Episode 09. This will include an interview with a special guest, and we’ve been at issues on scheduling! At the latest, we’ll get it done this weekend, so look for a new episode by early next week. Sorry for the wait (it will be worth it, though!). In the meantime, play some fun games! In the last few weeks we’ve acquired and played Sagrada, the Metagame, and 7 Wonders, all of which I would recommend! And, special shout-out to Ryan, who gifted me with a deck of Epic Card Game and a couple of other goodies he acquired at GenCon. Here’s a picture of the “gaming pile” on our dining room table.
Games can be thought of as solving one big problem: How do I win? Cognitive psychologists think about problem solving in terms of a search process, how to get from your current state to a goal state. I discuss what this means for how we play games.
I’m trying to get the word out about the podcast. If you found this website via Boardgame Geek and my attempts there to get the word out better, welcome! I’m now seeing triple digits in some of the episodes! Woo hoo!
I know what the next episode will be, one on problem solving. Then, either Episode 09 or Episode 10 will have a special guest it looks like. We are still working out the details.
Thanks for being on this ride with me! I hope you are enjoying it!
One constraint that everyone has is working memory capacity. Or in other words, how many things you can remember at any one point in time. While there are individual differences in this, another aspect turns out to be more important: chunking.
I consider the popular board game Pandemic from a number of different angles. What makes it an interesting game, cognitively speaking? I touch on decision making, attention, cooperation, and also the Legacy and iPad versions.
Humans do not always make the most optimal decisions. We are limited by our cognitive resources. We usually make decisions, even in playing games, that are just “good enough.” The process of making a “good enough” decision is known as satisficing.
I’ve now done four episodes of the podcast. I’m pretty proud of them. I know what the next two are going to be. The next one will be about decision making (well, one small area within decision making, as that broad topic could have 6-8 episodes at least). Then, the sixth one will be a different type of episode, one I’m currently calling a “game vivisection,” where I take one game and examine it from different angles, both cognitively and otherwise. I think I know which game it will be first.
Six episodes then I think will be, not necessarily a “season” but a set. A set of episodes will then have 3-4 shows where I look specifically at a cognitive concept, relating that one concept to a number of games, 1 or 2 more philosophical podcasts, and then 1 or 2 game vivisections.
And, there are people I don’t even know listening to the podcasts! The Word Press plugin I use gives me some info about number of downloads per episodes, along with how they got the episode (Hello! Overcast listeners; that’s the app I use; and, hi to my one listener from Stitcher!) I set a pretty modest goal of listeners for the outset, think double digits, and it has been met. Once I get six episodes in the can, I’m going to try to “market” a bit more and I have a new goal for after that.
For about as long as there have been computers, there have been computer programs that play games. This episode considers some of the history of game playing computers, and how that has shed light on the nature of human intelligence.
You need to have focused attention while playing games. If you don’t, you might miss a critical move in a board game, or totally miss that other player about to blast you in Call of Duty. This episode considers how attention works as we play games.
