5 Popular Dog Training Games and Benefits
Dog Training can be a game, via Wikipedia
Dog training games can be use to complement your daily dog training activities to teach your dog basic commands and cultivate desirable behavior and at the same time foster your interest in learning new things.
Many studies have also shown that dogs tend to learn faster and respond more positively to the training when the lessons are fun and innovative.
Using games during training, you will also provide your dog a natural healthy channel to expand out any excessive energies that might otherwise be use to chase animals, bark at neighbors or dig around your yard.
There are several innovative games you can play with your dog however these are the 5 more popular training games that you can start using immediately:
Game of Exchange: Teaches your dog his name and the “Come” command at the same time by recalling your dog to come back to you in exchange for a reward like a pat or treat. Can be easily play throughout the day, your dog will soon be able to recognize the verbal command and come back towards you even without any rewards.
Game of Fetch: Throwing a frisbee or ball, you teach your dog to follow and retrieve the item back to you. Allow your dog to exercise, develop enthusiasm and their natural retriever instincts. Also helps teaches your dog both the “Fetch” and “Drop It” command.
Game of Tug-of-War: As the name suggest, a tug-of-war for the blanket or rubber toy – this game develops your dog physical prowess and helps build up his confidence (if you let your dog win most of the time).
Game of Hide and Seek: A very useful indoor game to teach your dog the “Wait” and “Seek” command during rainy days. You hide a treat or an object (preferably his favorite toy) and ask your dog to search for it. It also encourages the use of your dog’s natural curiosity in constructive explorations and helps create familiarization around his/her surroundings.
Game of Socialization: Spending time with people or other animals. This game develops the social skills of the dog and its connection with other animals and people.
There are also many benefits when you incorporate games into your dog training, such as:
The games are good exercise and help your dog to keep fit, strong and healthy.
The training games develop agility, responsiveness, attentiveness, vitality, and manners in your dog.
The playing time create a great bonding opportunity for you and your dog to spend quality time together.
The games help the dog to cope and adapt better to the changes in his life.
The games helps you to communicate your commands to your dog more effectively as the process is less boring or stressful.
The games is also an important aspect in social development to cultivate your dog curiosity and exploration instinct.
In all, dog training games are really a wonderful way for your your dog get stimulated both physically and mentally. Your dog will also actually be looking forward to his next training session once it realizes how much fun the training was.
James Lee
What is the thesis in this article????10 Points!?
James Gee, a professor of learning sciences at the University of Wisconsin, was profoundly humbled when he first played a video game for preschool-age kids called Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside. Gee’s son Sam, then 6, had been clamoring to play the game, which features a little boy who dresses up like his favorite action hero, Pajama Man, and sets off on adventures in a virtual world ruled by the dastardly villain Darkness. So Gee brought Pajama Sam home and tried it himself. “I figured I could play it and finish it so I could help Sam,” says Gee. “Instead, I had to go and ask him to help me.”
Gee had so much fun playing Pajama Sam that he subsequently decided to try his hand at an adult video game he picked at random off a store shelf—an H. G. Wells–inspired sci-fi quest called The New Adventures of the Time Machine. “I was just blown away when I brought it home at how hard it was,” he says.
Gee’s scholarly interest was also piqued. He sensed instantly that something provocative was happening in his mind as he struggled to complete the puzzles of the time machine. “I hadn’t done that kind of new learning since graduate school. You know, as you get older, you kind of rest on your laurels.”
Gee’s epiphany led him to the forefront of a wave of research into how video games affect cognition. Bolstered by the results of laboratory experiments, Gee and other researchers dared to suggest that gaming might be mentally enriching. These scholars are the first to admit that games can be addictive, and indeed part of their research explores how games connect to the reward circuits of the human brain. But they now recognize the cognitive benefits of playing video games: pattern recognition, system thinking, even patience. Lurking in this research is the idea that gaming can exercise the mind the way physical activity exercises the body: It may be addictive because it’s challenging.
All of this, of course, flies in the face of the classic stereotype of gamers as attention deficit–crazed stimulus junkies, easily distracted by flashy graphics and on-screen carnage. Instead, successful gamers must focus, have patience, develop a willingness to delay gratification, and prioritize scarce resources. In other words, they think.
The video game Tetris, among the earliest games to launch the industry, involves falling tile-like tetraminoes that a player must quickly maneuver so they fit into space at the bottom of the screen. In the early 1990s, Richard Haier, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Irvine, tracked cerebral glucose metabolic rates in the brains of Tetris players using positron-emission tomography (PET) scanners. The glucose rates show how much energy the brain is consuming, and thus serve as a rough estimate of how much work the brain is doing. Haier determined the glucose levels of novice Tetris players as their brains labored to usher the falling blocks into correct locations. Then he took their levels again after a month of regular play. Even though the test subjects had improved their game performance by a factor of seven, Haier found that their glucose levels had decreased. It appeared that the escalating difficulty of the game trained the test subjects to manipulate the Tetris blocks mentally with such skill that they barely broke a cognitive sweat completing levels that would have utterly confounded them a month earlier.
Nearly a decade after Haier’s study, Gee hit upon an explanation. He found that even escapist fantasy games are embedded with one of the core principles of learning—students prosper when the subject matter challenges them right at the edge of their abilities. Make the lessons too difficult and the students get frustrated. Make them too easy and they get bored. Cognitive psychologists call this the “regime of competence” principle. Gee’s insight was to recognize that the principle is central to video games: As players progress, puzzles become more complex, enemies swifter and more numerous, and underlying patterns more subtle. Most games don’t allow progress until you’ve reached a certain level of expertise.
To understand why games might be good for the mind, begin by shedding the cliché that they are about improving hand-eye coordination and firing virtual weapons. More than 70 percent of video games contain no more bloodshed than a game of Risk, and are popular because they challenge mental dexterity. Among the best-selling game franchises, The Sims involves almost no hand-eye coordination or quick reflexes. One manages a household of characters, each endowed with distinct drives and personality traits, each cycling through an endless series of short-term needs (companionship, say, or food), each enmeshed in a network of relationships with other characters. Playing the game is a nonstop balancing act. Even a violent game like Grand Theft Auto involves networks of characters that the player must navigate and master, picking up clues and d
The thesis is like the main idea of the paper, so I would guess "Gee’s epiphany led him to the forefront of a wave of research into how video games affect cognition."
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