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February 2021
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How Brain Training Games Strengthen Executive Functioning Skills
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How Brain Training Games Strengthen Executive Functioning Skills

Executive functioning skills are key to learning and managing in daily life. Whether you are a student or a high-powered CEO, knowing how to self-monitor, think flexibly, and recall information is crucial for success. However, many children have difficulty with planning, understanding and following directions, or staying focused, all of which can diminish their self-esteem and enjoyment of school. If your children are struggling with these skills, introducing them to brain training games is a fun way to help them develop their executive functioning skills.
What are Brain Training Games?
Simply put, brain training games are activities that stimulate your thinking. They are believed to play a major role in improving cognitive functions because they can strengthen select brain skills and help maintain overall brain health. Additionally, they may sharpen certain thinking skills that tend to wane with age, such as processing speed, reaction time, decision making, and short-term memory. For children with executive functioning challenges, brain training games can offer a much-needed boost to help them develop these skills at an early age. 
Lumosity Brain Fitness Program
Brain training games, such as the Lumosity Brain Fitness Program, offer fun and challenging exercises to keep student minds actively engaged. The games use problem solving, critical thinking, and memory activities to keep students on their toes and strengthen their skills. While there are dozens of options in this program, below is a curated list of our favorites.

Lumosity has dozens of exercises that target the types of memory that are important in everyday life, including working memory, spatial memory, and the ability to recall names and faces.
  • Memory Serves. In Memory Serves, you take on the role of a bellhop who is tasked with keeping track of the ever-changing inventory as you simultaneously attempt to deliver the right bags to hotel guests. This game challenges your working memory because it asks you to remember information for short periods of time for the purpose of completing a specific task. Additionally, this game requires you to utilize your ability to incorporate new and changing information throughout a given activity.
  • Familiar Faces. For this game, you must remember the names and orders of patrons at a restaurant; failure to do so will result in loss of tips and place your promotion in jeopardy. Familiar Faces is an exercise in working and visual memory, which are related to the kinds of memory challenges that we experience on a daily basis. It challenges you to quickly match a customer to their order by recalling specific details about each person and their food preferences. 
  • Memory. In this game, you endeavor to quickly memorize a group of tiles on a grid and remember their location, and maybe even the shapes they create. This task challenges a part of your short-term memory called spatial recall, which is your ability to track location and position within an environment.

Many students with executive functioning challenges struggle to sustain attention to tasks they perceive as boring. Lumosity has several attention activities that require you to either respond to multiple tasks (divided attention) or concentrate on relevant information while simultaneously ignoring irrelevant information (selective attention). 
  • Train of Thought. In this game, your task is to guide an increasing number of trains to their color-coded stations, which requires you to divide your attention to guide the trains simultaneously. As the game increases in difficulty, the trains and stations become adorned with multiple colors, which further taxes your ability to concentrate. The aim of the game is to improve focus and avoid distractions. It also requires forward thinking as are required to look ahead as much as possible and switch tracks to make sure that your train goes to the proper station. 
  • Lost in Migration. The storyline of Lost in Migration is that birds migrate every autumn and, unfortunately, some get lost and only the center bird flies in the right direction. You are therefore tasked with helping the birds find their way by determining the direction of the center bird without getting distracted by the incorrect directions of the surrounding ones. This game exercises your attention abilities and can boost your focus, helping you avoid distraction and improve productivity in your daily life.
  • Trouble Brewing. This game requires you to fill multiple coffee orders at the same time. Trouble Brewing works on your ability to simultaneously respond to multiple tasks without losing track of your obligations. It also strengthens the necessary skills needed to properly divide attention between tasks in order to ensure success.  

Task switching is the process of adapting to changing circumstances, switching from one goal or strategy to another in order to achieve an objective. The flexibility games on Lumosity teach children the importance of being open to change and how skills such as flexibility, attention, and memory are connected. 
  • Disillusion. In this game, you must match tiles by color or shape according to ever-changing rules. Disillusion requires you to constantly switch between tasks, which means balancing the cognitive process for following directions and interpreting the shapes and colors presented to you. Due to the constant goal changes of the game, flexibility, malleability, and adaptivity are all required to find success.  
  • Brain Shift. With this particular game, you are asked to switch between two rules that depend on whether the letter-number pair appears on the top or the bottom card. The location of the letter-number pair is random, so you will not be able to predict where it will appear next. Due to its lack of predictability, Brain Shift requires you to exercise mental flexibility as you process new rule changes and recall their corresponding directions.
  • Color Match. In Color Match, you are provided with two cards with the name of a color written in different colors on each card. You then have to determine if the meaning of the word on one card matches the color of the word on the other. To be successful in this game with challenging instructions, you have to suppress your inhibitions and your desire to quickly pick a card. Instead, you have to keep the directions in mind, carefully look at the two cards, and then make an appropriate choice.  
Final Thoughts
Brain training games are to the mind as exercise is to the body. These fun activities are a great way to sharpen and hone executive functioning skills without the added burden of feeling as though these tasks are tedious and taxing. With technology becoming a more integral part of our children’s daily lives, parents can use programs like Lumosity to make sure that time spent online is both productive and fun.  
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Pawsome Time-Saving Tips

In 2020, I jumped on the bandwagon: I got a puppy! Since I expected to be at home more often due to the pandemic, I thought it would be the perfect time to take care of a growing puppy. Little did I know that taking care of a cuddly, furry friend would be a lot more work than I expected. However, I quickly adapted and came up with some strategies to help me better handle these exciting new times. Here are some tips to help new dog owners retain some of their sanity and save time throughout the day.