Reasoning on Reasoning through Serious Games

This paper, based on a long term experience conducted in primary schools, investigates the cognitive abilities involved in playing with digital mind games. The experimental work with pupils was first focused on game dynamics and aimed to identify some general cognitive skills required to children to successfully interact with the games. Subsequently, a more detailed investigation was carried out focusing on the actual cognitive abilities required to solve specific reasoning tasks proposed in a variety of selected mind games. The different number of information to be taken into account and processed while tackling each reasoning task appeared to be the key element that differentiates pupils´ performance. This finding was in-depth analyzed also in respect to the children´s level of school achievement and some considerations were drawn confirming the potential of mind games for developing young students´ reasoning abilities and also paving the way for better tuning related game-based interventions, from a methodological standpoint.