The best thing to do for a child having difficulty staying focused and paying attention to their homework might be to put them in front of a game console, according to a recent study.

Researchers at Akili Interactive Labs, a Northern California startup video game company, claims that for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), playing a videogame for 30 minutes a day may be more effective than taking a pill, Reuters reported.

They are in the process of developing a treatment game, called Project EVO, to improve cognitive skills in children with the childhood disorder.

"We've been through eight or nine completed clinical trials, in all cognitive disorders: ADHD, autism, depression," Matt Omernick, executive creative director at Akili, told NPR earlier this year. "The qualities of a good video game, things that hook you, what makes the brain -- snap -- engage and go, could be a perfect vessel for actually delivering medicine."

After playing the game, the 80 children involved in the pilot study had improvements in their working memory and levels of attention. Half of the children involved in the study had ADHD.

According to Reuters, the company will now "'move full steam ahead' into a full randomized trial, that if successful would support a filing with U.S. regulator, the FDA."

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, diagnoses for ADHD have risen in recent decades. About 9.5 percent of children between the ages of 3 and 17 in the United States had the childhood disorder in 2012, Reuters reported.

Results from the company's pilot study were presented at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry's 62nd annual meeting.