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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Brain Lab Launch at NCTM Conference
Bill Ritchie is CEO and co-founder of ThinkFun Inc.
We are gearing up for this year’s NCTM Conference in Washington, DC from April 22-25, and I invite you all to visit our booth and meet the Education Team. We are exhibiting at Booth 1447, and we’re also presenting an Exhibitor Workshop on Thursday morning from 8:30-9:30 in Room 143 A (Convention Center).
We're particularly excited about this year's NCTM Conference, because we will be launching our new ThinkFun Brain Lab program! This program features our Super Solver System which is designed to teach generalized problem solving skills to elementary and middle school students. I wrote about the development of this in our February newsletter, and since then we have been hard at work transforming these ideas into a rich program.
Rush Hour turns out to be the perfect game to teach our four Problem Solving Steps. With "Minimum Spaces Rush Hour," players are challenged not only to simply get the Red Car out of the traffic jam, but also to do so by moving the fewest spaces possible. We have developed a set of challenges that are easy to solve, but prove extremely vexing when the goal becomes solving them in the fewest spaces. Students really want to get the solution, and when they have to try again and again to do so, a beautiful teaching opportunity emerges.
Chocolate Fix is a wonderful game to demonstrate the meaning of "strategy." In the Brain Lab program, students are taught three game specific strategies and then practice identifying and discriminating between them. We are developing Lesson Plans that will help explain to students how these strategies map to more universal "Super Solver Strategies" that can be used to solve many different problems in life.
Many of you have been working with us to test these programs. Feedback from our classroom testers tells us we are on the right track. Our testers report that children really open up to these ideas when presented in a way they can relate to, by playing these wonderful games. Thanks very much to all our testers — your comments and observations are so valuable and greatly appreciated!
We will be demonstrating the Chocolate Fix and Rush Hour Brain Lab programs at our NCTM booth. We'll even have a Smart Board on hand to show how we are integrating the real games with specially designed online versions. It’s very exciting!
Please come by and visit us, we look forward to seeing you!
Chocolate Fix Brain Lab Launching Soon
Tanya Thompson is the Director of Education Programs at ThinkFun Inc.
The launch of Rush Hour Brain Lab .... Exciting.
Having an education team with a combined 40 years of experience developing and teaching with mind challenging puzzles .... Valuable.
Partnering with visionary teachers to test our new product in the classroom .... Priceless.
In January we were thrilled to announce the launch of the Rush Hour Brain Lab which provided lessons based on our most popular game and gave teachers structure we believed they were looking for. We celebrated the fact that we now had a product designed to teach problem solving more intentionally. While we knew this first attempt was not perfect, we were eager to get it into the hands of teachers so we could learn from them. Shortly after Rush Hour Brain Lab launched, we put out a call for classroom testers. The response was phenomenal! We ran six weeks of testing with the goal of revealing changes that were needed, and we are currently implementing many of these suggested modifications in preparation to reveal the next generation of this product!
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| A student perseveres through a Chocolate Fix challenge. |
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Now we are testing our new, not yet released, Chocolate Fix Brain Lab. In developing this new Lab, we applied a great deal of what we learned from Rush Hour Brain Lab testing. We are pleased to announce that we will be launching our entire Brain Lab program at NCTM Annual.
To give you an idea of the direction in which we’re headed, please check out a wonderful Introductory Power Point we developed to introduce the Lab and the Super Solver System of problem solving. Also, we have developed an online Chocolate Fix Board and Pieces that allows teachers to display and discuss any Chocolate Fix challenge they desire with their whole class.
These are only two of the new features we’re developing for this soon-to-be released Chocolate Fix Brain Lab (we couldn’t resist sharing!), so please stay tuned and we’ll let you know when it is ready for prime time!
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