Abstract—Children have become increasingly attached to
smart devices as they become more ubiquitous in our society.
Parents find themselves positioned between two extremes with
no evidence of which may work. Taking a radical stance against
device usage (whether absolute freedom or strict prohibition)
does not work with children particularly. Yet, it is known that
there are negative impacts from over usage. A mobile
application has been developed to provide a moderated
approach to this issue. The concept is to pause all games every
few minutes and challenge the child with a question in Math,
Science, or English related to their school curriculum. Children
cannot keep playing unless they provide the correct answer and
review their lessons in the process. In essence, this allows
children continue to play on the condition that they review their
lessons. Through this work, the concept of how children should
perceive video gaming is changed. The outcome is to
demonstrate to children that a tablet or smartphone is a
privilege, not a right and that the price of the privilege is other
activities including school work. In this article, the researchers
have investigated the conditions of the usage of smart devices
and devised a new solution that allows parents to minimize
physical and mental damage while avoiding the extremes of
freedom or prohibition. This was determined during an exercise
that has been conducted on children playing games to measure
their level of anxiety with and without the proposed solution to
assess its efficiency. Four experts observed 40 children playing
games and documented their reactions in terms of
hyperventilation, abnormal movements, heartbeats, and blood
pressure. The experiment included 2 parts. In part I, players
kept playing for 30 minutes continuously without being
interposed. In part II, players were interposed every 4 minutes
and challenged with questions from their school curricula. The
objective of the experiment is to check whether an intervention
to the children every 4 minutes will lead to better physical and
mental conditions.
Index Terms—Future of gaming, children’s health, parental
control, addiction to smart devices, games, education.
The authors are with Global University, Batrakya, Beirut, Lebanon
(e-mail: ahammoud@gmail.com, draddam@hotmail.com,
nadaboukhari@yahoo.com).
Cite: Ahmad Hammoud, Khodor Addam, and Nada Bukhari, "The Effect of Creating an Intervention in Children’s Game Play and the Subsequent Minimization of Physical and Mental Damage," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 298-303, 2018.