These days, the media is overrun with advertisements for products designed with brain science. These products promise to make us smarter, enhance our memory, and to prepare our children for school and learning. Parents, eager for their children to excel, play Mozart, download apps, and buy expensive educational kits for their children, even their infants.
While the recent popularity of the subject has led to a influx of unproven products on the market, there are in fact excellent education enhancing apps that have real potential to enrich education and learning in kids of all ages and abilities.
The application of neuroscience to educational development in children is well proven. Children are learning all the time, both consciously and subconsciously. In addition to building knowledge, they are learning how to behave, make decisions, and adapt to the world around them. As they learn, the physical structures in their brains change, forming habits and skills that are critical to their success. It has been established that good educational practices can affect the brain in positive ways, establishing excellent learning patterns and behaviors in children that will transfer to other areas in their lives.
Problem solving, memory, critical thinking, and forming habits are just a few important brain functions that affect learning, and an understanding of how these processes work can establish new best practices and technologies for education. With tablets and smartphone becoming more accessible to children in their homes, their schools, and public libraries, educational apps based on brain science have enormous potential for learning. Playing the right kinds of games can form decision making skills, adaptability, creativity, all while entertaining our children.
Children today are digital natives, and have grown up in a world of smartphones and tablets. While some children have more access to these technologies than others, schools and public libraries make the technology available even to children who do not have it at home. Playing with animated and fun apps engages young learners, while introducing concepts and developing learning through game play and activities. The multimedia features of learning apps deliver the messages of the games through both the auditory and visual channels of the brain. Using both channels increases the amount of information that the brain can process, and so more of the information becomes permanent learning.
All of this sounds complicated, but parents and teachers don't need to be brain surgeons--or even brain scientists--to enhance learning in their children and students by using quality educational apps. Sprout Labs educational apps have been recognized by a wide variety of nonprofit educational organizations, recognized review sources, and other respected media. The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) has rated them the "Best Apps for Teaching and Learning," with reviews backing it up.
Apps can be fun and entertaining while providing knowledge in a more memorable way than ever. Teachers and parents should consider supplementing and enhancing their students' and children's education with quality, proven apps!