Our P7 pupils took great delight in being able to borrow the Nintendo DS consoles again. They all responded positively to them and all felt that their mental agility had improved as a result. They all felt that they could add and multiply much quicker as a result of using them.
‘Our favourite game was Low and High. We liked that it timed us – it made us work faster.’
‘We really like the Times Table game. It really helped us with our times tables.’
‘This is our favourite type of active maths!’
These boys said ‘We really liked using the nintendos, they helped with our mental calculations.’
In term 4 Primary 5 at Chapelside Primary School in Airdrie had the opportunity to borrow a set of 10 Dsi’s. The children were extremely excited about this familiar piece of equipment in their classroom. Only a few of the children had never used a DSi so initial instuctions in the use of the equipment was very quick and the more experienced users in the class were able to support the novices in getting to grips with this.
The children used the DSi during their everyday numeracy sessions in class. The children were shocked to discover that they were working with a brain age on average of 80 years old.
They were very keen to improve on this and an element of competition in doing so kept the children engaged as they battled to improve their own and at the same time beat their classmates ‘brain age’.
The main aim of using the DSi in our primary 5 classroom was to support the children in developing mental agility in order to assist and improve their work in numeracy. The nature of the games in the brain training programme helped the children to do this. This was esepecially evident during quick fire multiplication, addition or subtraction games used in whole class or group situations. I was very pleased to see that many of the children were answering the questions quicker and with more ease and believe this is linked to the use of the games in the brain training programme.
I would highly reccommend the use of DSis in the classroom in order to support and develop mental agility and to engage the children’s interest through the use of technology in the classroom.
