PSP, gameboy and other consoles, parents enemies to get their student to study, now a classroom ally.
In a growing number of cities, teachers hoping to engage children born in the fast-moving digital age are using game machines such as the Nintendo DS, the hugely popular double-screen handheld console, to draw in and hold students.
The strategy seems to be working in one Tokyo classroom, where students come for extra-curricular maths lessons each Saturday morning.
Saito Miyauchi, 12, approaches teacher Raita Hirai with a bashful smile as he holds up his DS screen. "That's great!" the teacher tells him after Saito has topped the class by doing 45 multiplications in 15 minutes.
"I've quickly grown accustomed to this," Saito says as he operates the machine with a touch pen.
Of the 26 students aged 12-14 who were advised to take the class to catch up with coursework, half showed up for the extra weekend session at the publicly funded Wada Junior High School.
Nana Watanabe's face streams with perspiration as she studies. She heaves a sigh of relief as she says: "The badminton club keeps me busy. But with DS, I can study everywhere, and quickly."
Volunteer instructor Kyoko Yamaguchi said she envied today's children.
"This was totally unthinkable when my children were in school," said Yamaguchi, whose three children graduated from Wada two decades ago.
Hirai, a veteran private tutor, says the game machines help ease the strain of repetitive lessons.
"It's not our aim to make them study. The aim is to make them study by themselves," he said.
Its actually, using the right technology at the right way. There are always two sides in a coin. Discipline and self-control is the first answer. and I also beleive that, those consoles releive stress.
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