• What is Memory Booster
• Why children need Memory Booster
• Training children to use memory strategies
• How can memory be improved?
• How does Memory Booster work?
• What age is Memory Booster suitable for?

What is Memory Booster?
 

Do you have children who can't remember information or instructions?
Who can't learn for tests and exams?

Memory Booster is a NEW approach to helping children improve their memory skills. Memory Booster is a computer program that is effective even without parental or teacher supervision. Memory Booster teaches flexible memory strategies and takes the child through enjoyable exercises that develop and extend learning skills. Memory Booster is adaptive, so the activities are automatically adjusted to the abilities of each individual child. Learning progresses at the pace that is best suited to their needs. However, parents or teachers can configure the program to make it easier or harder if this should be necessary.

Memory Booster contains attractive and colourful graphics that appeal to children and also has high-quality digitized speech. The program features voice of the international TV and film actor Brian Blessed as Pooter the Master Computer.

Memory Booster has been widely trialled in schools and homes, with very successful results. Children enthusiastically enjoyed using the program, and made measurable improvements in their memory and learning capacity. The vast majority of children also preferred Memory Booster to conventional memory training activities.

Memory Booster was created by Lucid Research, a company that has an international record for pioneering developments in educational software, especially for the identification of dyslexia and learning problems. Lucid's assessment and screening programs are currently used in over 6,000 UK schools and several foreign language versions have been produced. The research and development team responsible for Memory Booster includes psychologists, software engineers and graphic artists, all with unparalleled experience in educational software.

Why children need Memory Booster

In today’s increasingly complex world there are so many situations and occasions when children need to remember things – information, instructions, learning things for tests and exams, lists of things to do during the day. Many children find this task overwhelming and frequently forget things, to the annoyance of their parents and teachers. Some children – especially those with dyslexia or specific learning difficulties – have exceptionally poor memory skills, and these can result in them underperforming in school. Parents and teachers of these children often report that although they understand the work nevertheless they do badly in tests and examinations because they forget the material.

Memory Booster is a NEW and exciting approach to helping children improve their memory skills, requiring very little teacher or parental guidance.

Training children to use memory strategies

Towards the latter part of the primary school stage some – but by no means all – children begin spontaneously to use simple memory strategies that will help them remember things. It is not normally until well into secondary school that children spontaneously discover the more complex memory strategies that are necessary for effective learning.

However, psychological and educational research has shown that children of primary school age can be trained to use memory strategies, and can benefit from them in their learning on an everyday basis. By enabling children to acquire effective memory strategies the teacher or parent is helping to equip them with skills that will enhance their attainment in school both in the primary stage and beyond. With practice, these strategies should become automatic, so that in time learning and remembering requires less effort and more can be accomplished in the time available.

A big advantage of Memory Booster is that it does not require teacher or parent input to be effective, because the program teaches the memory strategies, provides structured practice in applying those strategies and gives a print-out of the child’s progress that the teacher or parent can review at leisure. The program can automatically adapt to the individual child’s needs and provide prompts where necessary, so that learning is maximised.

Children with dyslexia

Children who have dyslexia typically have memory difficulties. Usually these difficulties are in auditory working memory, so they tend to forget instructions, have problems learning multiplication tables, and easily lose track of what they are doing (e.g. when reading, writing, or doing arithmetic). Working memory also affects children’s acquisition of phonics (i.e. learning the relationships between letters and sounds).

Some children with dyslexia have problems with visual memory, so they find it hard to recognise words by sight (e.g. using ‘flash cards’), and also cannot find their way around using visual cues (e.g. in an unfamiliar place). Visual memory is also very important in spelling, because a great many English words are irregular and their spelling does not follow phonic rules. The only way to learn to spell irregular words is by using visual memory.

Whether they experience problems in auditory working memory or visual memory, or both, children with dyslexia should find Memory Booster especially helpful, because it teaches them strategies to learn more effectively and remember more easily. Memory Booster contains both visual and auditory/verbal features and has a beneficial effect on all types of memory problems.

How can memory be improved?

In order to make an individual’s memory more efficient we need to ensure four key things:

• Practice – the more often we do something, the more likely we are to remember it.
• Memory strategies – these are ways of processing information that will help you remember it better.
• Organisation – this ensures that information is stored in a more meaningful and well-organised way and which is easier for the brain to recall when needed.
• Understanding – if we understand information it is easier for us to remember, and if we understand how memory works, it is easier to make it work well for us personally.

Memory Booster helps the child to develop good memory strategies, to organise information efficiently, and to practice the skills necessary for effective learning and recall of information.

How does Memory Booster work?

Memory Booster has been designed to improve children’s memory by teaching tried-and-tested memory strategies and by giving enjoyable practice so that these strategies are assimilated and can be applied in everyday learning activities. Memory Booster has six levels of increasing complexity, and incorporates many features that help to motivate children and ensure that they get the most from the activities. The program automatically adjusts the difficulty according to the progress of the child, which helps to maintain just the right degree of challenge and maximises learning. The items in the program vary each time it is used, so children can play the adventure many times and not become bored. The program remembers where each child has reached in the game and next time they enter the program it automatically carries on from where they left off.

Memory Booster is presented in the form of an adventure game set in the castle of Pooter the Master Computer, who has lost his memory and needs help the child to recover it. Built-in cartoon rewards and encouragements that use attractive and humorous graphics to help to keep children highly motivated and to stay on-task at all times. The child helps Pooter by playing memory games for which they get points. Another character called Fiona helps the child in these memory tasks by suggesting a variety of memory techniques or strategies. Fiona makes her suggestions at various points in the game depending on how well the child is progressing. The child can visit Fiona at any time to learn about the memory strategies again. When the child has got sufficient memory tasks correct to move to the next level, they can help Pooter get some extra memory, better graphics and, finally, cure him of a virus attack! Pooter rewards the child by showing some amusing cartoons. Whenever the child feels like a break from the program they can leave and return on another occasion at the same point where they left off. The child (or teachers and parents) can see how well they have done by viewing the reports graph, which shows the number of points that have been accumulated and what memory level has been achieved. A personalised certificate of achievement can then be printed out.

What age is Memory Booster suitable for?