What is Focus Pocus?
Focus Pocus is a game with benefits. It is played for fun and was designed to provide an environment to practice skills such as attention, relaxation, impulse-control, and memory. You train to develop “powers” by mastering the 12 engaging mini-games. These powers help you battle the evil necromancer, and also may help improve behaviour and academic outcomes! In training mode, rewards and incentives are provided. The difficulty level of the games is adaptive, adjusting game-by-game to the performance of the child - the goal is improvement. Focus Pocus uses live brain electrical activity (i.e. EEG) from the NeuroSky MindWave portable EEG device, with some games controlled directly by brain power and control. |
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Testimonial
“David*, who is in Grade 6, has made amazing progress. David has been diagnosed AD/HD since Grade 3. Before training, he was very demotivated and underachieving at school, and could hardly pass any subject and had no friends. After 3 sessions he began to show improvements in class. He now has 2 friends. He has also made big progress in Maths, and seems more responsible and mature than before.” *named changed |
Testimonial
“According to his teacher, James* has made a lot of progress. He is much better in control himself and he can complete school work as quick as his peers. Before training he was very worried, demotivated and afraid to even hear any words that related to 'teacher'. Now he is a confident and happy boy.” *named changed |
Are parents seeing any changes in their children’s behaviour after Focus Pocus?
Parents completed an 18 item behaviour rating scale prior to, and at the end of, training with Focus Pocus. Figure 1 shows parent ratings of the frequency of three categories of behaviour, before and after training with Focus Pocus. After training with Focus Pocus there were reductions in the frequency of each category of behaviour. Parents made ratings of day-to-day behaviour at regular intervals during training (for example, after 5 training sessions had been completed). Figure 2 shows the parent ratings after 5, 10, 15 and 20 training sessions. The dark line shows the trend across training sessions, indicating improvement in behaviour across the training sessions. Are children learning awareness and control of brain states that will help them in everyday life? Children do a number of "benchmarking tests" of their ability to generate three different brain states spontaneously, without any on-screen assistance, to see if they are learning a skill they can use in everyday life. Figure 3 shows the brain state scores before and after training with Focus Pocus. The data shows increases in the ability to spontaneously produce each of the three brain state after training with Focus Pocus, with the largest increase in Focus. |
The Focus Pocus main menu
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