Nintendo scored a surprising market success with its Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training title on the DS–not a typical slash/shoot’em-up game at all, but rather one designed to actively boost your mental prowess. Along with other “edutainment” games, 5 million copies were sold in the first year. But recent research sheds light onto Nintendo’s claims, and reveals that using the DS is no more effective than figuring out problems the old way, with a pencil and paper.

Scientists at the University of Rennes, France, designed a test to investigate Nintendo’s claims that edutainment games like Big Brain Academy and Brain Training can improve the “practical intelligence” of users, and boost their memory “two to three times better” with repeated use.

The test involved splitting a group of 67 ten-year-old kids into different test groups. Two groups did a seven week training course revolving around brain-tuning software on the DS, while a third group did a sequence of old-fashioned brain-training exercises using paper and pencil. The fourth group acted as a control group, doing no extra work at all apart from their regular homework.

The kids took a series of mental tests that measured their logical thinking, mathematical prowess and memory before and after they’d been through the training regime.

The results showed that the children who took the DS-based training showed no significant improvements versus those who took the traditional tests. Some statistics even revealed that the DS group had a 17% fall in memory skills after the seven weeks, while pencil-and-paper kids performance rose by 33%.

As Alain Lieury, professor of cognitive psychology at the university, puts it: “If it doesn’t work on children, it won’t work on adults.”