Richard Wilson

Up until very recently I have dismissed the potential for learning through playing electronic games. I know that is wrong and shortsighted but over the October week I have had good reason to re-evaluate and realise the potential of at least some of the games on offer. I am talking mainly about the Nintendo DS Lite handheld gaming machine.

 It is a fantastic piece of kit that has some games that you should check out and give a serious look at. The Nintendo Big Brain Academy  is a game that teachers/parents may want to look at and evaluate, both for themselves and their youngsters. The game has five categories, Think, Memorize, Analyze, Compute and Identify. All of the games have three levels of difficulty and are all challenging, memorizing the 5×5 square at the easy level showed me I have a good memory for forgetting things!  As I played with it I came to realise that all of the components are great tools for training the mind and sharpening it up. I have purchased one for the school and am going to trial it with some target pupils and see if by using the training it can impact on their learning abilities. Meanwhile I’ll trawl the net to see if anyone else is using them in schools and to what effect. If I could get my hands on a set of 5 I’m sure I could conduct a good piece of research. That would cost about £600 or so. Meanwhile I’ll be asking Santa for one for me to use!

As part of our Healthy Schools programme we have been promoting the Walk to School Week. As many staff, pupils and parents as possible made the effort to walk to school all week instead of cars, buses and on occassion taxi. As a special effort we had three walking buses organised to walk to school along safe routes. In the past the school averaged about 80 pupils or so who took part. This time we had a fantastic response where 210 pupils, parents and staff walked from the assembly points to school. A great way to start the day!