What Parents Should Know About Neuroplasticity: Why We Use Simulations, Games, and Problem-Solving

Your Child’s Brain Is Not a Bucket to Be Filled

Parents are constantly told what their children should know.

Know multiplication tables. Know vocabulary words. Know historical dates. Know the parts of a cell. Know enough material to pass the next test.

Those things matter. Knowledge matters enormously.

But neuroscience asks us to consider a much larger question:

What is the process of learning actually doing to the developing brain?

At The Barrett School, this question influences why we use simulations, games, robotics, technology, laboratories, discussion, languages, projects, and complex problem-solving rather than treating education principally as the memorization and reproduction of information.

We are interested not only in what students know today.

We are interested in what kinds of thinkers their brains are learning to become.

That distinction begins with one of the most important discoveries in modern neuroscience: neuroplasticity.

What Parents Should Understand About Neuroplasticity

The human brain is not a finished machine delivered at birth.

Neural networks continue changing in response to experience. Connections can strengthen and weaken. Patterns of activation change with learning. White matter and myelination can change. Dendritic and synaptic structures are remodeled, while networks become increasingly specialized and efficient.

A systematic review of training-induced neural plasticity in children and adolescents found measurable changes in brain activation, structure, microstructure, or connectivity in the large majority of the studies it examined. (PubMed)

Even more strikingly, recent neuroimaging research indicates that some measurable structural changes associated with experience can occur over remarkably short periods. A 2026 systematic review examined evidence of rapid structural plasticity following experiences including motor, spatial, perceptual, and language learning. (PubMed)

And a particularly relevant 2026 study examined children transitioning into formal schooling. Researchers found schooling-associated changes in cortical regions involved in reading and mathematics, beyond those attributable simply to getting older. Children showing greater changes in some of these regions also demonstrated greater academic improvement. (PubMed)

That does not mean teachers should pretend to be neurologists.

It does mean that education is literally an experience capable of helping shape the developing brain.

That makes what children repeatedly do in school extraordinarily important.

The Brain Does Not Simply Need More Connections

There is an unfortunate popular simplification of neuroplasticity that goes something like this:

Learning creates more neuronal connections, therefore more connections equal a smarter brain.

Neuroscience is considerably more complicated.

Learning involves strengthening some connections, weakening others, reorganizing networks, improving communication among neural systems, changing myelination, and even eliminating unnecessary connections through pruning.

The objective is not to produce the neurological equivalent of a bowl of spaghetti.

It is to build efficient, flexible networks capable of responding to unfamiliar problems.

That distinction is central to our educational philosophy.

This Is Why We Use Simulations

Imagine two students learning physics.

One student memorizes:

Force = mass × acceleration.

He correctly reproduces it on a test.

Another student enters a simulation.

She increases the mass of an object.

The system behaves differently.

She changes acceleration.

Something else happens.

She makes a prediction.

The prediction fails.

She adjusts her hypothesis.

She changes another variable.

Now the result matches her expectation.

She must explain why.

Both children encountered the same equation.

But they did not necessarily perform the same cognitive work.

The second student repeatedly engaged prediction, working memory, causal reasoning, error detection, hypothesis formation, cognitive flexibility, and problem-solving.

This distinction helps explain why properly designed simulations can be powerful educational tools.

A substantial body of research on simulation-based and technology-supported learning finds advantages for knowledge, performance, and problem-solving under appropriate instructional conditions. Reviews also emphasize something we consider crucial: technology by itself is not the intervention. Educational design is. (ScienceDirect)

Put a child in front of bad software and you have automated a bad lesson.

Put a child inside a carefully designed intellectual problem and technology can allow something that a worksheet often cannot: the student can manipulate the world and immediately confront the consequences of his or her reasoning.

Why We Use Games

The word game makes some adults nervous.

For reasons I have never entirely understood, an activity apparently becomes intellectually suspicious the moment a child enjoys doing it.

Yet games can require extraordinary cognitive activity.

A sophisticated game can require a student to:

maintain information in working memory,

allocate limited resources,

reason spatially,

recognize patterns,

make probabilistic judgments,

form hypotheses,

monitor multiple variables,

inhibit an impulsive response,

predict another player’s actions,

revise a strategy,

learn from failure,

and solve novel problems.

That is hardly intellectual inactivity.

Recent evidence is particularly interesting.

A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis examined 133 studies, 269 effect sizes, and 14,245 participants. Across several different research designs, video-game play had statistically significant but generally small positive relationships with cognitive abilities including memory, spatial ability, visual attention, cognitive control, and intelligence. (PubMed)

Another meta-analysis of video-game cognitive interventions found an overall positive cognitive-training effect and, importantly, found that specific gameplay mechanics predicted cognitive transfer better than crude labels such as “action game” or “strategy game.” (PubMed)

That is enormously important for parents.

The useful question is not:

“Are video games good or bad?”

That is almost meaningless.

Ask instead:

“What is this particular game requiring my child’s brain to do?”

That is a scientific question.

But Do Games Increase IQ?

Here parents should be suspicious of anyone giving an excessively simple answer.

There are studies suggesting positive relationships between gaming and intelligence or particular cognitive abilities.

There are also serious studies finding little evidence that video-game training produces broad improvements in general intelligence.

A major meta-analysis by Sala and colleagues found small or negligible overall effects and concluded that evidence for broad causal improvement in cognitive ability from video-game training was weak. The problem is something psychologists call far transfer. (PubMed)

Far transfer means that getting better at one intellectual task causes you to become better at a substantially different task.

That is surprisingly difficult.

Learn chess and you become much better at chess.

Practice a working-memory task and you generally improve on that task and related tasks.

Play a spatially demanding game and spatial cognition may improve.

But none of those automatically converts into a dramatic increase in generalized intelligence.

Meanwhile, other meta-analyses have found meaningful improvements in attention, spatial cognition, and other abilities, although publication bias and differences among games complicate the literature. (PubMed)

The scientific conclusion is therefore neither:

“Games make children geniuses.”

Nor:

“Games rot children’s brains.”

Both are slogans masquerading as neuroscience.

The more defensible conclusion is that specific forms of cognitively demanding gameplay can train particular cognitive abilities, while broad transfer depends heavily upon what is trained, how it is trained, and whether students subsequently use those skills in different contexts.

That is precisely why games at school should be connected to discussion, mathematics, writing, experimentation, history, science, and real-world problems.

The goal is transfer.

Stop Measuring “Screen Time” as Though a Screen Were an Activity

Another thing parents should increasingly question is the phrase screen time.

It combines radically different cognitive experiences into one convenient but scientifically crude category.

A student can spend thirty minutes:

watching an endless stream of short videos,

programming a robot,

talking to a grandparent,

designing a three-dimensional object,

reading Plato,

building a simulated electrical circuit,

playing an adaptive strategy game,

or mindlessly tapping advertisements.

Every one of those activities occurs on a screen.

They are obviously not cognitively equivalent.

We should certainly care when technology displaces sleep, physical activity, social relationships, outdoor activity, and healthy development.

But counting minutes without examining what happens during those minutes is increasingly inadequate.

We should start counting thinking.

The Montessori Problem: When Educational Philosophy Becomes a Brand

This brings us to another subject parents should understand.

Educational history is filled with movements that began with interesting ideas and eventually became brands.

Montessori is a particularly useful case.

Maria Montessori introduced important ideas more than a century ago: manipulation of physical materials, student independence, carefully structured environments, self-directed activity, and respect for children’s developmental differences.

Some of those ideas remain valuable.

And intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that Montessori education has empirical evidence in its favor.

A 2023 systematic review covering 32 studies found positive average effects on several academic and nonacademic outcomes. Another 2023 meta-analysis likewise reported positive effects across several developmental domains. A recent national randomized study of public Montessori preschool found advantages by the end of kindergarten in reading, short-term memory, theory of mind, and executive function among children offered Montessori placements. (PubMed)

So our criticism should not be the lazy claim that Montessori has been disproven.

It has not.

Our criticism is more interesting.

Why should an educational philosophy developed in the early twentieth century become an endpoint rather than a starting point?

Maria Montessori died in 1952.

Neuroscience did not.

Neither did cognitive psychology.

Neither did computational science, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotics, developmental psychology, game theory, learning science, or our understanding of executive functioning.

An educator in 2026 should be willing to take whatever Montessori got right and combine it with everything humanity has learned since.

That is how science progresses.

The Montessori Name Itself Should Make Parents Ask Questions

There is an additional problem that has received much less attention.

The American Montessori Society itself acknowledges that any school can call itself Montessori regardless of its fidelity to Montessori philosophy or practice. Only a subset of member schools meet AMS accreditation requirements. (The American Montessori Society)

Think about what that means for a parent.

“Montessori” may sound like a credential.

It isn’t necessarily one.

The name can function as branding.

That became painfully visible in 2026.

The $440 Million Montessori Warning

In September 2026, The New York Times published an extraordinary investigation into Higher Ground Education and its Guidepost Montessori chain.

The company had attempted to scale a for-profit Montessori network at something approaching technology-startup speed. At its height, Guidepost operated approximately 150 locations. Higher Ground ultimately filed for bankruptcy after accumulating approximately $440 million in losses, and dozens of schools closed.

Former employees interviewed by the Times described serious concerns about the expansion model. Seven compared aspects of it to a pyramid scheme, and one former teacher said employees internally joked about a “Montessori Ponzi scheme.”

Founder Ray Girn disputed those characterizations while acknowledging that the company’s expansion strategy had been financially irresponsible. (Monorepo Sample 2)

That distinction matters.

It would be inaccurate to announce that Montessori education itself is a Ponzi scheme.

It isn’t.

But parents should take something important from the Guidepost story.

A beautiful educational philosophy can become a beautiful marketing department.

A century-old name can create an aura of legitimacy.

Neither substitutes for evidence, qualified educators, financial stability, curriculum, modern learning science, or careful examination of what children are actually doing.

A wooden bead does not become scientifically superior to a computer simulation simply because it is wooden.

And a school does not become neurologically sophisticated because its shelves are attractive.

Montessori Should Face the Same Standard as Every Other Educational Method

This is where education sometimes becomes strangely religious.

People identify themselves as Montessori educators, classical educators, progressive educators, traditional educators, homeschoolers, unschoolers, technology educators, or proponents of whatever the newest acronym happens to be.

Then the philosophy becomes something to defend.

That is backward.

Education should not ask:

“How do we remain faithful to the method?”

It should ask:

“What does the evidence currently tell us about learning?”

If Montessori materials work for a particular concept, use them.

If direct instruction works better for another concept, use it.

If Socratic dialogue produces deeper reasoning, use it.

If a simulation lets a student manipulate a system that cannot physically be reproduced in a classroom, use the simulation.

If robotics converts abstract mathematics into an engineering problem, build the robot.

If a video game develops spatial reasoning, strategic planning, or cognitive flexibility, there is nothing intellectually impure about using it.

Schools should serve children.

Children should not serve educational philosophies.

From Montessori Manipulatives to Digital Simulations

Ironically, the logic behind good digital simulations is not entirely hostile to Montessori.

Montessori understood something important: children often learn through interaction with an environment, rather than merely listening to someone describe it.

We agree.

We simply do not believe the learning environment has to stop evolving in 1952.

A Montessori manipulative allows a child to manipulate a physical representation.

A sophisticated simulation can allow a child to manipulate:

gravity,

evolution,

economic markets,

electrical fields,

chemical reactions,

planetary systems,

ancient civilizations,

ecosystems,

architectural structures,

genetic inheritance,

or the curvature of spacetime.

Try fitting a black hole onto a Montessori shelf.

Technology allows us to extend experiential learning into systems that human beings could never otherwise manipulate directly.

That is not abandoning hands-on education.

It is expanding what the human hand can reach.

Why Problem-Solving Matters So Much

The research on computational thinking is another reason we emphasize these experiences.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of coding interventions found benefits to executive functions and particularly strong effects on problem-solving, with different approaches benefiting different age groups. (ScienceDirect)

A 2024 meta-analysis of problem-posing instruction found a moderate positive effect on cognitive outcomes, including thinking and problem-solving processes. (ScienceDirect)

Again, the mechanism should interest parents.

When students encounter novel problems, they cannot simply retrieve an answer.

They must construct one.

That means combining knowledge from different neural and cognitive systems.

It means tolerating uncertainty.

It means discovering that the first answer may be wrong.

It means modifying a model of the world.

That is learning at its most interesting.

And This May Matter Across an Entire Lifetime

There is another reason parents should care about the developing brain.

Education may have consequences extending decades beyond graduation.

Researchers use the term cognitive reserve to describe, roughly speaking, the brain’s capacity to maintain cognitive functioning despite aging or neurological pathology.

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of 27 longitudinal studies found greater cognitive reserve across early, middle, and later life was associated with lower dementia risk. (PubMed)

The 2024 Lancet Commission on dementia likewise identified education among a larger group of potentially modifiable factors associated with dementia risk across the lifespan. Physical activity, cardiovascular health, hearing, vision, social connection, smoking, diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, and other factors also matter enormously. (PubMed)

We therefore must be careful.

No school can promise that solving physics simulations at twelve will prevent Alzheimer’s disease at seventy-five.

No video game is an Alzheimer’s vaccine.

But there is legitimate scientific reason to investigate how lifelong cognitive challenge, education, social interaction, physical activity, and intellectually demanding experiences contribute to cognitive reserve.

Perhaps the most fascinating evidence comes from the ACTIVE randomized trial of 2,802 older adults.

Researchers compared memory training, reasoning training, speed-of-processing training, and a control group. After ten years, speed-of-processing training was associated with a 29% reduction in dementia risk relative to the control condition, whereas the memory and reasoning interventions did not produce statistically significant reductions. (PubMed)

Notice what that result does not say.

It does not say:

“Exercise your brain and dementia disappears.”

It says something much more interesting:

specific cognitive experiences may matter differently.

And that brings us straight back to education.

What Parents Should Ask a School

Do not simply ask what curriculum a school owns.

Ask what students actually do with it.

Do not simply ask whether classrooms contain technology.

Ask what students use that technology to create, test, question, model, and solve.

Do not simply ask whether a school calls itself Montessori, classical, progressive, STEM, traditional, project-based, or college-preparatory.

Ask for something more important:

What evidence informs the way children learn here?

Ask whether students encounter unfamiliar problems.

Ask whether they have to change strategies when they fail.

Ask whether mathematics is something they perform or merely something they memorize.

Ask whether science means reading a chapter or actually thinking like a scientist.

Ask whether technology makes students intellectually passive or gives them intellectual agency.

Ask whether the school’s philosophy changes when better evidence appears.

That last question may be the most revealing of all.

The Plastic Classroom

At The Barrett School, our use of simulations, educational games, robotics, digital environments, dialogue, laboratories, mathematics, classical languages, art, music, and project-based learning comes from a broader conception of education.

We are not interested in technology because technology is fashionable.

We are interested in cognitive experience.

We want students retrieving knowledge, combining it, manipulating it, questioning it, applying it, getting things wrong, correcting themselves, defending conclusions, discovering patterns, and confronting problems for which the answer is not conveniently printed at the bottom of the page.

Neuroplasticity gives modern education an extraordinary responsibility.

The question is no longer merely:

What information did we give this child?

It is:

What did we repeatedly ask this child’s brain to do?

A century ago, Montessori helped education ask whether children should interact more actively with their environment.

That was a valuable question.

But education cannot become a museum dedicated to the educational technologies of 1910.

The twenty-first-century classroom can contain blocks and books, pencils and robots, Socrates and simulations, physical manipulatives and virtual worlds.

The objective is not fidelity to an educational brand.

It is human development.

And if our children’s brains will spend their lives adapting to a world that none of us can completely predict, then perhaps one of the greatest gifts education can give them is not simply a larger collection of answers.

It is a brain experienced in confronting questions it has never seen before.