“Beware of #landmines or anything that looks like an old bomb!”This week, the United States Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, tweeted a grave warning to anyone in Southeast Asia who happened to be playing a certain, popular, augmented reality video game. “Aside from the normal determinants of success in tests, such as studying, playing online video games is also positively associated with higher scores.”Posso says the reason for this correlation may be obvious — “that more able students play more (video games).” In other words, it could be that already academically high achieving kids play games online; not that playing video games causes kids to achieve high grades. But maybe the most telling finding of Posso’s study is this: Students who reported using social media regularly, as opposed to online gaming apps, actually faired worse academically than students who just gamed, sans social media. “The relationship with test scores and social media use was found to be negative and statistically significant,” says Posso. The outside pressures of social media can turn us perpetually inside ourselves, not a great place to be when the object is the pursuit of learning new things.

Source: thestar August 21, 2016 09:56 UTC