STOMP: Structured Training of Mental Processes

The Bunge Lab is a cognitive control and development laboratory at UC Berkeley, headed by Dr. Silvia Bunge. They research into behavioral and neurological issues of adults and brain development in children.

One of their ongoing research projects involving kids is STOMP, Structured Training of Mental Processes, which is dedicated to seeing how carefully selected games affect children’s brain development.

Positively, appears to be the outcome.

On the Newsweek blog Nurture Shock, written by the authors of NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, the authors report on the success of the project on introducing selected board, card, and video games to a select group of underachieving children. The results: a 13 point IQ gain in a mere 20 hours of play time.

The games fell into two categories:

• Reasoning ability: SET, Rush Hour, Qwirkle, Picross, Big Brain Academy, Azada, and Chocolate Fix
• Processing speed: Spoons, Spit, Brickbuster, Blink, and Perfection.

Turns out that nurture, and not nature alone, has a lot to do with intelligence.

(source, source)