LearningWorks for Kids had the honor of leading a webinar for ADDitude Magazine entitled “Minecraft and ADHD Kids: Brain Boosting or Attention Busting?” on Wednesday, March 5, 2015. If you were unable to attend you can still listen to the entire session by going to the ADDitude Magazine website. In our webinar we presented some of the pros and cons about playing Minecraft and other video games. James Daley and I also talked to parents about concerns such as excessive video-game play and described how to use Minecraft to improve children’s planning, flexibility, focus, and organizational skills.

One of the major topics of the webinar was a discussion of the current research on the positive and negative effects of video games on children’s thinking and behavior. Parents were particularly interested in issues such as setting effective limits, the irritability that some children experience after playing Minecraft, and the impact of watching videos about video games rather than playing the games themselves.

More than 6000 people signed up for the webinar, and hundreds of questions were posed to Susan Caughman, moderator of the webinar and Editor in Chief of Additude Magazine. After the webinar many questions  remained unanswered. Fortunately, ADDitude Magazine shared these questions with us. We have been responding to them in a series of posts on Additude Magazine that describe strategies for making Minecraft and other games tools for learning.

If you’d like to know more about issues such as how to help kids transition from playing Minecraft to other activities or the maximum amount of time a child should be allowed to play with Minecraft, check out our posts on ADDitude Magazine. If you are interested in learning more about whether children with ADHD should play Minecraft or what your kids can learn from Minecraft, check out some of our previous posts on LW4K.