For years we have brought Rush Hour into school classrooms to help children exercise their minds. In 2007 we developed a program specifically designed to teach the ThinkFun Super Solver System, a classroom enrichment program where students follow a disciplined process to learn critical thinking and motivational skills.
Our ThinkFun Game Club program clearly resonated, thousands of teachers signed up and used the program in their classrooms. The message that came back to us loud and clear is that teachers are searching for a way to teach thinking skills, as well as teaching content. From the larger perspective, this is clearly where our entire education system needs to be going, to get our children ready for for the 21st century.
One important thing we learned is that it is hard to teach thinking process! It is not part of our established procedures, and indeed children do not naturally have a good set of language skills with which to describe their thinking process. We were actually a little startled to discover how fundamental this issue really is.
So here the end of 2009 we are launching a study to explore this topic. Working with our study group of teachers and students, we are going to start by learning about what ability children naturally have to describe a problem and the thinking process they go through to solve it; using modified versions of Rush Hour challenges. Then we will work the students, working in conjunction with their teachers and parent coaches, through a series of Rush Hour challenges and exercises with the objective of improving on their ability to become self aware of their thinking process, and helping them to be more effective with their descriptions of how they set up and worked through the challenges. We will end with a second snapshot of the same students, and see if they have made any progress in their ability to express themselves. From there, we will start working on our next generation study.
Stay tuned, we’ll keep you posted!
If you’re interested in learning more about this program, contact Charlotte Fixler
