SCHOOL’S BRAIN TRAINING

First year students at Summerhill College in Sligo were the toast of their peers on Friday last as they received their certificates of completion from SMART brain training.

The SMART (Strengthening Mental Abilities with Relational Training) initiative is a learning and teaching tool developed by Dr Sarah Cassidy and Dr Bryan Roche from Maynooth University.

Students at the college were able to use the tool through logging in to a central system and from here, the programme helped them with their vocabulary, word meaning, grasping basic and advanced logic, remembering information and using numbers for maths problems.

The programme has been rolled out all over the country but has been championed the most by Summerhill.

Dr Roche was present at the gym on campus to present students with their certificates.

He explained to the Sligo Champion how the programme helped students.

“You could call it a brain training tool but it’s a completely different type of tool for increasing intellectual ability”, he outlined.

“It’s the only such tool in the world that is proven in many studies to raise children’s fundamental intellectual ability.

“This then feeds through to their school work. “Most other forms of brain training just gets you to practice a particular task over and over again so the effect in general means you’re really good at spelling but you still can’t do your maths.

“What we do is we teach fundamental, relational skills that underlies the whole lot and we teach the kids to become really quick at these puzzles we give them.

“For instance, ‘A is opposite to B and B is opposite to C, is C the same or opposite to A?’

“That’s the logical reasoning process and we teach them thousands of those.

“It turns out that’s beneficial for reading and remembering.

“Everyone gets the same thing no matter the age. The idea is that if you’re a very young kid, you benefit more because you’re being brought up to the standard of someone much older than you.”

Second year students at the college are also taking part in the programme and are due to complete it in the coming weeks.

Dr Bryan Roche from Maynooth University takes Summerhill students through the benefits of the SMART initiative, a novel brain training programme developed by Dr Roche and his colleague Dr Sarah Cassidy. The programme is being rolled out in schools across the country with Summerhil being one of the main champions of the initiative.

Summerhill student Andrew Conway receives his certification of completion from Dr Roche.

Dr Roche and Aaron French.

Declan Brennan, teacher at Summerhill College is pictured with Dr Bryan Roche.