ForageKid Club

What is the game like?

We will mix video game activity with physical and intellectual activity during each session in a cooperative group environment.

Video game activity. In the video game, children will be looking for familiar toys moving around the screen (see gif example above). There will be several targets and distractors, and the goal will be to get a given number of points as fast as possible. We will ask them to look for one or more targets, or different instances of different target types, to stop the search when something changes in the background, or to decide when to move to a new level of the game that may take more or less time or effort by doing other activities. We will also give occasional breaks to change the game to a different, but also a fun, learning, and challenging activity.

Quiz Questions. We will ask them to also play in groups answering some simple and fun quiz questions where they can get more points in different cooperative groups (for instance: What color you get from mixing yellow and blue? or How do you spell the word "SUMMER"? or Who was Martin Luther King Junior?). This part is thought to be a fun way to learn new things from science to history or even philosophy, while they take some rest from the video game activity.

Physical game activities. Some studies have shown that short and quick physical activity from time to time, help young children increase their level of attention when doing a demanding task. There will also be some exercise challenges in order to win the games too. For instance, they will be challenged to do, 20 jumping jacks, 10 push-ups, in one minute; play Simon Says or similar games to increase the score of the group.

Cooperative Environment. All of this will be done in a cooperative way to get more points and win the games all together to get a final prize for everyone. The prizes will be stickers, “research-diplomas” or other type of arts & crafts.

What other activities they will do in the club?

Children will run a few standard executive function tasks for comparison with the foraging game; tentatively scheduled from the beginning of the club in late February to the end in June. The tests provide baselines to determine if the video game can really help children to increase their executive functions during this research study. They will be very basic attentional tests, like the Stroop attentional task, the CPT or a child-base questionnaire about "everyday" activities that may demand attention, memory and executive functions to be performed.

From time to time, we may also unobtrusively record childrens’ eye movements using a fun device where they can also play with blinking eyes, following a dot and “see” how their eyes move around the screen.

CPT. The Conners Kiddie Continuous Performance Test 2nd Edition™ (Conners K–CPT 2™) . This test measures different attentional capacities like selective attention, sustained attention or impulsivity. The test takes 7.5 minutes for a performance-based assessment using familiar object pictures (e.g. boat, soccer ball, train) to young children. The child must press the space bar to all objects except for one. For the older children and adolescents (8 and older), the Conners Continuous Performance Tests 3 is similar but uses letters instead of pictures and takes about 15 min.

"Everyday" activities questionnaire. We will ask children how easy or difficult are different tasks in their everyday life to perform. How good are they at planning and organizing their tasks at home, at school... How easy it is to remember a given number of items in a shopping list, where they placed some objects or following more or less complex instructions, etc. This questionnaire may take 40-50 minutes to be done, but we will do it in different sessions of no more than 15 minutes each one.

What will be the parent's role in ForageKid Club?

Parents may be asked to fill out a couple of short questionnaires before and after the program. We will ask parents to fill out the BRIEF (Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function) looking for different measures related to executive functions (it takes no more than 10 min). Parents also provide information about their child’s development only if it affects the care of the child during the ForageKid Club (like a potential atypical cognitive development, specially if it is related to executive functions) and information about the use of electronic devices and video game playing at home (it takes no more than 5 min). All this information will help us to make sure that any change in executive functions after the ForageKid Club playing our video game may not be due to other potential factors in children's environment.

All these tasks overall will help us to test if the ForageKid Club makes a difference in executive functions abilities of the children joining the club.

Important: As part of the research study, parents will be asked to give written informed consent for their child´s participation. The ForageKid Club staff will provide all necessary documents to join the club and be part of the study.

THANKS A LOT ALL YOU JOIN THE FORAGEKID CLUB!! WE REALLY HOPE THIS WILL HELP US TO UNDERSTAND AND PROMOTE A HEALTHY AND FUN COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR CHILDREN!!