In the race for comprehensive development, the child's parents overload him with useful leisure activities. Numerous clubs and sections with almost no time left for regular games. Some may think that this is a good thing: the child is not sitting idle.

But the game - it's not just fun: playing a child learns the world, and develops communication skills, systematic thinking, and imagination.

One of the most popular online games is the game Plinko: plinko-online.games

As a child grows up mobile games, dolls, designers and cars gradually give way to others - sometimes desktop, but often computer-based. And if parents are comfortable with desktop games, online entertainment is traditionally frowned upon. And not coincidentally: a few years ago, the WHO included gaming addiction in the list of international classifications of diseases.

If you are not too keen on video games, they can be useful. For example, last year a group of Chinese scientists conducted an experiment on the effect of action games on brain function. The results showed that the gamers' brains process the incoming signals much faster, and this helps them to react well and to multitask.

By the way, this is not the first study on the benefits of video games: back in 2003, scientists found that avid gamers can boast of better control of attention - the ability to switch it between different tasks as needed. In addition, the connection between the ranks of game characters and a person's leadership style in life has repeatedly been noted.

Of course, this does not mean that many hours of sitting behind a screen with a shooter will make a child a great strategist. In addition to the risk of game addiction, concentration on the same type of activity can have a bad effect on other skills.

Educational Games

Game mechanics are a great way to keep a child's attention, so gamification has long been used in education to increase motivation. This rule works both for children and adults: for example, game elements can be found in all kinds of online courses.

Games in education can take many different forms. When students earn and lose points, move to new levels, and compete with each other for a place in the rankings - this is gamification. Learning math activities while playing a computer game where you have to sort balls into different baskets is also gamification.

Game-based learning

When learning is based entirely on a game model rather than limited to specific elements of it, it is called game-based learning (GBL). In this approach, game-based learning is no longer just a tool for gaining knowledge, but an end in itself. This means that the ultimate goal is quite game-based - not to solve a problem, but to capture a castle or save the planet. But in the process of achieving it, the user develops useful skills.

Of course, it is difficult to completely build a whole training course on the GBL principle, although there are some successful examples. For example, at Quest to Learn school in New York, each discipline is like a fascinating adventure with its own plot. Ninth graders play the role of biotechnologists in a fictional laboratory where they clone dinosaurs, and sixth graders travel with the fictional character Dr. Smalls.

Game-based learning is often used to practice IT skills. There are many computer games for developers where the "pass" to the next level are lines of code. One of the most popular is Robocode, where users control an army of robots and fight enemies using Java, Scala, and C#.