ThinkFun Classroom Games
Check out our Individual ThinkFun Games — no price increases from 2008!
Contribute to the ThinkFun Forum
We want to hear from you! Visit the new ThinkFun Education forum for teaching tips, inspirational stories, and to share your experiences using games with your students!
Contact the ThinkFun Education Department
Tanya Thompson, Director of Education Programs
tthompson@thinkfun.com
Charlotte Fixler, Education and Curriculum Specialist
cfixler@thinkfun.com
Great prices on vintage ThinkFun puzzles.
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What Is Our Goal?
Bill Ritchie is CEO and co-founder of ThinkFun Inc.
Our team at ThinkFun Education is working hard to develop our programs, and we are very passionate and excited about what we are doing. In this issue, I want to address the question, "what is it that we are trying to accomplish?"
In a nutshell, we believe that we are on our way to developing a program that provides an organized method to teach problem solving skills to elementary and middle school students. Our goal is that students will internalize our problem solving approach, be able to articulate it, understand when and how to use it, and generalize this learning to problems they face throughout their lives.
Our program will teach the three fundamentals of Problem Solving called the "Three S’s of Problem Solving":
STEPS: The first thing a successful problem solver needs to do when encountering a problem is to understand the problem and make an overall assessment and plan. Then s/he must look back and check the reasonableness of his/her solution.
STRATEGIES: To be a successful problem solver, students must develop a mental toolkit full of Problem Solving Strategies, such as "eliminate possibilities" and "work backwards." Once equipped with a reserve of strategies, students learn to evaluate a problem and draw from them as appropriate.
STATE OF MIND: Successful problem solvers need to have the right Problem Solving State of Mind, which consists of a positive "problem solving attitude" and the belief that "I can do it!"
Our program is based on the best educational ideas of the past half-century, and we know they are solid. What is unique is that it is also based around our fantastic ThinkFun games... games that children naturally want to play and to succeed at because they are so much fun!
As far as we can tell, there has never been a program which has successfully tackled the topic of problem solving skills before. (Please get in touch if you know of one.) We are thrilled to have you involved as we push forward to turn this idea into a reality and start spreading the word around the country and around the world!
Visit Our New Education Forum
Tanya Thompson is the Director of Education Programs at ThinkFun Inc.
| |  | | | Brandon works through a challenge on a SMART Board during a Rush Hour Brain Lab. | I am pleased with the response we’ve had for testers for the Rush Hour Brain Lab. We now have teachers in the U.S., Canada and Turkey embarking on teaching the Three S’s of Problem Solving using the lesson plans and team games outlined in the RH Brain Lab. If you have 4 copies of Rush Hour and you’d like to join us, please contact me to become involved!
In our efforts to build a valuable Education community, last week we launched our new forum! We’re hoping this will be a place where teachers (like you!) share questions, comments and ideas. It is our goal to connect teachers across the world world and we want to learn more about you!
This forum is also where the Brain lab Testers will be discussing their feedback! Since I wanted to be an active member in this testing process, I also began teaching the RH Brain Lab. You can read the details here. What I learned is that students really resonate with the Three S’s of Problem Solving. This lesson caused students to begin to internalize the first S — the Problem Solving Steps. The classroom teacher even asked for a Super Solver poster and she has already begun to use our problem solving language with her students for their upcoming Standardized Math Test.
Lastly, we hope you like our new website design! Click past the homepage and you’ll see we’ve added lots of photos. Some of you have also thanked us for not raising the product prices for the Educational games on our website. We will try our best to continue to offer you great prices! And don’t forget to visit our forum and post a comment, question or story! We want to get to know you better and build our education community!
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