About Us: ThinkFun Education
Meet the ThinkFun Education Team! Bill Ritchie, ThinkFun CEO & Co-founder, Charlotte Fixler, Education & Curriculum Specialist, and Tanya Thompson, Director of Education Programs
Our goal is to create a flexible program that empowers our young people to be remarkable thinkers and thus prepared for their future.
Here's how we intend do it:
- Help young people to BELIEVE that they are problem solvers, and to understand that their most important preparation is to start with the right problem solving attitude. Be curious. Be persistent. Be a risk taker.
- Teach young people that there are four simple steps they can follow when they encounter a problem and don't know what to do. They should start by asking, "Do I really understand this problem?" and go through a cyclical process of testing and questioning and reevaluating to help them reach a solution.
- Give young people a toolkit of problem solving strategies by developing their ability to identify game-specific strategies and then empowering them to generalize these strategies to real-life situations. They develop the understanding that they can have access to a broad mental toolkit of reasoning techniques that can help them address and solve many challenges in their lives.
There is a crisis brewing with our nation's children — they are not being adequately prepared to meet the challenges awaiting them as they become citizens of the 21st century. Our school systems are being forced to teach to the No Child Left Behind tests. There aren't many venues outside of school for young people to develop even the most basic critical thinking skills. And this at a time when society is moving faster than it ever has, when the majority of 21st century jobs have not yet even been invented.
That's where we come in. ThinkFun games are designed to challenge your mind; you love playing them and have great fun using your brain to think through and solve the problems we present to you through the games. For nearly 25 years, ThinkFun has been the world leader in logic puzzles, brainteasers and strategy games. Renowned puzzle expert Jerry Slocum calls us "The best puzzle company in the history of the world."
Now we're developing school and home programs to teach problem solving, logical thinking, number sense, and other formal critical thinking disciplines through an organized system using our most popular ThinkFun games. This is really cool stuff... we are just beginning, and there is a whole lot to explore. We want to share our journey, and we invite you to follow along and help us grow our vision into reality.
Our story is this journey to ignite minds all over the world. Our journey has just begun, and we strive to develop games and programs that develop players' abilities to become better thinkers. Do you worry for our future and want to do something about it? Then come, join our ThinkFun mission and help us provide the tools to our children so they can make the most of the crazy, difficult world that they will inherit from us.
Archive
Rush Hour Brain Lab v. 1.0 (January 2009)
Chocolate Fix Brain Lab v. 1.0 (March 2009)