If you REALLY want to test your powers of concentration and memory, you should try reciting the names of all 44 American presidents while executing a complicated cup-stacking pattern while surrounded by a distracting chorus of stomping, clapping classmates.

Now do it in 17 seconds.

A nationwide video contest launched by LearningRx inspired a slew of impressive videos of kids reciting the names of all 44 presidents while hitting baseballs, doing gymnastics, and ignoring obnoxious distractions.

The winner of the contest was eleven-year-old Travis Coron of Succasunna, NJ, who scored the grand prize of an iPad in this year’s national President’s Day contest with a 31-second clip that demonstrates amazing concentration, memory and multitasking skills. The 6th grader, who attended the LearningRx Brain Training Center in Chester, New Jersey, quickly recited all 44 U.S. presidents while performing a complicated cup-stacking pattern and blocking out major distractions. (Click here to see Travis in action!)

The contest encouraged kids across the country to create videos that showed their improved memory and attention skills after participating in LearningRx brain training.

Memorizing the presidents is one of the first things students master, says LearningRx Vice President of Research and Development Tanya Mitchell. According to Mitchell, the training exercise strengthens long-term memory, attention and other cognitive skills, and also gives a big boost of self-confidence.

“It’s just one of the ways our brain training helps build smarter, faster and more efficient brains,” she explains, adding that “The video is great. It definitely leaves people saying, ‘How did he do that?’”

To see more LearningRx contest entries, click here.

In a recent article, Bellini says “Speaking from my experience as a teacher, we typically spend the first six to eight weeks of the school year helping students relearn what they forgot over the summer. It’s just like working out muscles – you have to keep your brain trained.”

So, how can we keep kids’ brains in shape and avoid summer slide? Here’s one way that might surprise you.

Summer Slide – A Smart (and Musical) Idea

I once heard a lecture by a man named Andrew Pudewa, called The Profound Effects of Music on Life. It was a generally fascinating lecture about music and how it’s really good for your brain. He said that, for developing a child’s brain, playing the piano is one of the best things possible because it integrates four key elements: the visual (reading the notes on the page), the tactile (plunking out the notes on the keyboard), the auditory (hearing those same notes played), and the metronome (which forces the student to do all three at once). He had all kinds of stats showing the amazing gains that piano students experience, compared to other students, in their general cognitive abilities.

What caught my attention is that LearningRx’s methods mirror this technique. We combine and integrate visual, auditory and tactile stimulus, and we use a metronome. The lecture was given back in 2001, and assuming that Mr. Pudewa was conducting his own research during the previous decade, it was right around the same time that Dr. Gibson was in the middle of developing the LearningRx program. Neuroscience, and especially the findings concerning neuroplasticity, have changed the way that not only education, but the arts, are being understood.

Summer Slide – Okay, but what if my kid isn’t musical?

Not everybody can (or wants to) play the piano. Can you think of something your child enjoys that integrates their visual, auditory and tactile senses in an ordered way? It doesn’t have to be piano. It could be another instrument, it could be dance classes, or competitive quizzing clubs, or even at-home quizzing games they could play against their siblings for prizes.

And if you really want them to get ahead of the curve, hire a personal brain trainer for them – because after brain training, forget summer slide – they’ll be asking the teacher “why are we learning this again?”