Improving children's spatial ability with Croc: The legend of Gobbos

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the effects of playing a video game with high spatial content on children’s subsequent spatial abilities. Forty 6-year-olds were pretested on four tasks considered to require different spatial abilities. These tasks were Object Assembly and Block Design from the WISC-R, a mapping task involving 2D to 3D translation and 3D to 2D translation, and a computer-based spatial reaction time task. Twenty of the children were then given two hours of play on a Sony Playstation 3D simulation video game, Croc: The Legend of the Gobbos. The control group did not play the game until after the posttest. In the posttest, the four tasks were administered again. It was found that the Croc players improved on Object Assembly and the mapping task and this improvement was significantly greater than for the controls. On Block Design and the reaction time task, however, the two groups performed similarly at posttest. It was concluded that some spatial abilities improve in the short term as a result of playing spatial video games. These findings highlight the positive side of video game play for young children