Scottish schools have a new recruit. He's called Dr Kawashima, and he's a stickler for learning by rote. Nevertheless, the kids love him. This is probably because he is a virtual teacher and his platform is Nintendo DS.

Our plucky pupils are leading the way in educational innovation. For 10 weeks, a class at St Columba's primary in Dundee spent the first 20 minutes of the day playing with hand-held games consoles running the so-called "brain training" software.

The performance of the class was compared with another which was taught by traditional methods, and teachers reported improved maths results, better behaviour and a greater focus. Oh, and less work to mark.

Part of a pilot run by the curriculum body Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS), the exercise was hailed a success. Now Her Majesty's Inspectors of Education are backing LTS in conducting a wider study, and the scheme will be rolled out to 16 schools across Scotland.

I expected to come over all Victor Meldrew at these reports of children being allowed to play Gameboys in class. Surely they should be knuckling down to long division, parsing sentences and learning their times tables backwards. We're just far too soft nowadays, letting them have fun when they should just be thankful to have jotters and pencils rather than slates and chalk. Harrumph.

Then again, maybe engaging with children on their terms is the way forward. Derek Robertson of LTS thinks so. He believes games consoles have the power to stimulate young minds.

The curmudgeon in me wonders what's changed over the years that means we've got to spoonfeed our children with learning via the games they like to play.

I don't remember going to school and learning to spell with the help of Scrabble, read with the help of the Jackie or count with a few hands of cards. That would indeed have been fun.

In those days, it was the inspirational power of a teacher that could make or break your educational experience. Of course, there are are good teachers and not-so-good teachers, but I'm sure they would share a common disappointment if they were to be usurped by Dr Kawashima.

Mr Robertson, however, is keen to promote the doctor's new-fangled methods. The approach is radical: lots of sums and word exercises practised over and over again. Sound familiar? Hmmmm.

Thankfully, there are sceptics. Robert Logie, professor of cognitive neuroscience at Edinburgh university, said: "I think they're just games. Focusing too much on this as a sort of catch-all cure for what people see as a lack of mental ability is misleading."

Experts have several possible reasons why the brain-training consoles raised pupil performance at St Columba's.

My favourite is the "practice effect". This posits the theory the children got better at tasks because they repeated them regularly.

Brilliant. In less enlightened times, the practice effect came from 20 minutes of mental arithmetic and spelling every morning.

It is thought to be the first time a government-backed, scientifically controlled study of this kind has been undertaken. Let's hope it's the last, so educationists can turn their minds to more meaningful research. And before the Super Mario brothers take over our schools.