PLAYBOOKS

The Playbook Tutorial

Our Playbook Tutorial helps you understand how best to use LearningWorks for Kids playbooks for video games and other digital technologies. Prior to using our playbooks, we strongly encourage parents, teachers, and peer tutors to familiarize themselves with our guides to executive functions, generalization, and coaching children. By arming yourself with this knowledge, you amplify your opportunities to use children’s digital involvement as a training ground for executive functions. The following tutorial describes each of the sections in our game-coaching guides.

This Game is Good for Kids Who Need Help With: Describes specific behavioral problems and the executive skills required to address these concerns. This section will help parents determine if the executive skills practice will help their child.

What You Need to Know About the Game: Describes the type of game, console, and general age and developmental ratings for the game. Indicates need for reading, where to find the game, and general instructions and “cheat sheets” for the game. Provides technical information, as well as methods to learn more about how the game works and how to find walkthroughs for it.

This Game Helps Your Kids With: This is the core portion of the playbooks and provides information about specific game tasks that require the use of executive functions. This section describes executive function skills that are required in the game and how they are used in the game, and then provides further information about how to generalize these skills to specific situations in the real world by using our Talking Points and Making It Real sections.

Talking Points: These dialogues serve to illustrate the importance of selected executive skills in the child’s life. They are general statements and questions that parents, teachers, and peer tutors can use to help connect game-based strategies to the child’s use of executive skills in the real world. Talking points are conversations about game play and digital technology utilization that illuminate and make the use of executive functions explicit. Initial talking point questions help children “detect” where they have used an executive skill in game play.

It is best to start with talking about the child’s digital play itself (kids are usually motivated to talk about games), and then move the discussion into how executive skills are used in the game and in real life. Getting kids to describe “what and why,” rather than “how” is our goal.

Talking points are also an effort to produce an “informed application” of executive functions in digital technology involvement so that the child thoughtfully applies executive skills in game play. Talking points are also designed to make the child more aware of his/her use of executive functions and to “reflect” on how these skills help him/her in game play. Metacognition, or thinking about thinking, requires both the child’s engagement in the game and dialogue about his/her activities. A word of caution: most children do not want to be interrupted during game play to engage in a lengthy conversation about their strategies and thinking. It is far better to preview the game prior to game play, talk about the different executive functions used in the game (see LearningWorksforKids Coaching Guides), or, better yet, have the child teach you how to play the game and ask him/her to articulate his/her thinking and decision-making strategies for success.

After identifying how executive skills enhance game performance, the follow-up talking points ask how he/she might use or “connect” these same skills in the real world. The talking point questions encourage the child to “detect, reflect, and connect” how executive skills are used in the selected digital technology and his/her real world.

Making It Real: The core element of LearningWorksforKids is making a connection between skills used in game play and those needed in the child’s day-to-day life. It is important to increase a child’s awareness by talking about these skills and then providing practice opportunities in the real world. While some digital technologies and games require the use of executive skills in a fashion that simulates the real world (for example, scheduling and organizational strategies used on a personal digital assistant), most games do not directly bridge game-based executive skills to similar real-world situations. It is therefore important to make the child aware of his/her use of executive skills in the game, to help him/her consciously think about what he/she has done, and help him/her make an informed application of these skills in the real world. Setting up situations that provide him/her with opportunities to practice these skills is imperative.

Making it Real presents “real life” opportunities to practice, develop, generalize, and maintain executive functions in day-to-day activities. Sustained effort and thought are required for game-based skills to transfer to home and school situations. Parents and teachers facilitate the application of executive skills by consciously creating opportunities for practice, acknowledging and encouraging executive skills in vivo. In addition to specific recommendations in our Playbooks, parents are encouraged to refer to our “Real Life Guides” for other areas to practice, as well as to “kid directed” games, simulations, and activities that require the use of similar executive skills. Parents are encouraged to use these tasks to generate awareness of the use of executive functions. Connecting these “real life” situations to strategies used in games and digital technology increases awareness of the application of executive functions, encouraging reflection. Using verbal praise and rewards (e.g., extra game time or privileges) can be helpful in encouraging your kids to generalize and maintain executive skills in their day-to-day activities.

“Making It Real” is about “connecting” game-based skills to practice opportunities in the child’s life (home/school/environment) and other contexts. The behavioral tasks and strategies require the use of similar executive function skills. Our efforts are to find specific real-life situations requiring executive functions that parallel similar situations in the game setting and to provide parents, teachers, and trainers with step-by-step methods to help kids learn these executive skills.