A neuroscience researcher in the UT Arlington College of Education has developed a holiday gift guide that can help parents engage children ages 5 to 10 in science, technology, engineering and math concepts.

Among other benefits, the gifts on the Neuroscience Primer list help young children create new memory traces, reason with numerical concepts and develop interpersonal relationships, Malaia says.

The "Neuroscience Primer" was developed through a partnership between the College's Southwest Center for Mind, Brain and Education and the Research and Learning Center launched earlier this year in collaboration with the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.

"Graduate students in my Development of Cognition course spent a semester at the Research and Learning Center investigating important skills that children need to have at the elementary age," said Evie Malaia, assistant professor of curriculum and instruction. "The skills are not things that can be explicitly taught. Rather, they are skills that most children acquire over time and with experience."

Malaia cited, for example, a child's ability to retain multiple constraints in their mind, which helps them use their executive system. The executive system regulates, controls and manages other cognitive processes.

"Children need to pool resources with others and cooperative games help them learn all of this," Malaia said. "These games are social and at a young age, interaction with parents and others is the most important way for a child to learn."

Among other games, the gift guide features:

• Blink - promotes task switching

• Cubulus - helps with spatial cognition

• Fish Stix - supports the ability to negotiate interpersonal relationships

• Rat-A-Tat-Cat - encourages the ability to reason with numerical concepts

• Simon - helps with memory encoding

Debbie Cockerham, an alumna of the Southwest Center for Mind, Brain and Education program, serves as director of the Research and Learning Center. She worked with families during the pilot phase and said the gift guide is a key example of the researcher-public collaborations that the center seeks to create.

"It's great to see that an outgrowth of Dr. Malaia's studies is addressing a need expressed by many participants' families," Cockerham said. "The Research and Learning Center's goal is to bridge the communication between researchers and the public, and this is an ideal public service product that resulted from that collaboration."

The Neuroscience Primer: Holiday Gifts for Elementary School Kids guide is available online at http://eviemalaia.weebly.com/usefulness.html. Featured items range in price from $5 to $149.96, and are available online at Amazon.com, via other websites and at most retail stores that carry children's toys and games.