Puzzle Games Kids Love to Solve
Whether it’s getting children to go back to school or finding ways to enhance their learning over the weekend and holidays, digital puzzle games can be a big help. These aren’t just games designed with incentives to learn “numbers bonds” or French vocabulary. There are many games designed to be fun where the learning is a useful secondary outcome.
In particular, puzzle games are great at getting the grey matter working. These range from the simple piecing together of pictures to complex decisions involving which unit is statistically more likely to win. Among these are some stand-out games that also deliver a lot of learning.
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a crime adventure about a down-on-his-luck detective duck. Play involves exploring the crime scenes to find clues and using them to complete statements about what happened. It stands out for the sentence-building deduction that requires lateral thinking and detailed observation.
Chants of Sennaar is a traversal and translation puzzle where you play a traveller called to reunite the People of the Tower who are unable to communicate with each other. Play involves exploring the cell-shaded world to decipher the puzzles and piece together a new language. It’s a cerebral challenge not only for the puzzles but also for learning how symbols and language work.
A Little To The Left is a puzzle game where you tidy a house into meticulous order. Each puzzle presents everyday objects and some evidence of how they should be organised. Working out the right sequence and position of objects to tidy each scene builds spatial and geometric skills useful in maths.
Mini Metro is a strategy game where you create an ordered, efficient underground train system. It sounds like hard work, but the simple Tube-map visuals, calm music, and streamlined interactions make this relaxing, like sudoku. It teaches not only strategic thinking and working with systems, but staying organised as the volume of travellers slowly increases.
A Monster's Expedition is a puzzle game where a monster finds creatures on an island and learns about the history of humanity. The puzzle is how to get from one island to the next by pushing over and rolling trees to make bridges. It teaches resilience because players need to keep working on a scenario even when it seems impossible to solve.
Stickin' the Landing is a puzzle simulation game where you place planet stickers to use gravity to direct your rocket-less spaceship to its destination. Play is simply a matter of placing the right combination of sticker objects so your ship slingshots in the right direction without crashing. It teaches a little physics but the real learning here is how to use limited tools to achieve the desired results.
Conclusion
These are all games that kids love to play (and solve). Playing them together in your family is a great way to get the most out of them educationally. Talking about how you are progressing and what strategies are working (or not) ensures that your children's knowledge is reinforced and processed. Also, it’s a lot of fun to see how they progress from being a beginner to an expert in some of these complex challenges.
Author: Andy Robertson, is a family gaming expert who appears in The Guardian, BBC and national broadcasts. He wrote the Taming Gaming book for families.
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