In a search to find the best summer educational opportunities for kids, I discovered Smart Games, a company that specializes in games that teach children how to strategically use their thinking skills. As a certified teacher, I encourage my kids to continue learning during the summer. Simple logic games are a great way to keep children occupied with an educational product on car trips. To see whether the games really worked and engaged children, I tried two games out with my older daughter Samantha.

Smart Games Review

The first game I tried was IQ-Blox. Something cool about the toy was that it had really vibrant colors. My daughter, who is more engaged with bright colors, instantly was excited to play. To play, I looked inside the key, which game with several different ways to set up the white pieces. When the white pieces were in the right place, the player needed  to come up with the arrangement that would work so that all of the pieces would fit inside the box. At times, my five-year-old daughter got frustrated, so I made the game easier by putting one or two colored pieces in the box. When Samantha only had a few pieces to figure out, she had an easier time focusing on how to flip and rotate those items, instead of getting overwhelmed by trying to fill the whole space.

When we were playing the game, we played the most simple of arrangements. The game came with a key so I could solve each game to model how to play the game for my daughter.  Something else I liked was that the instructions had a wide range of levels of difficulty to meet the needs of all kinds of learners. Because the game had more complicated arrangements, it could easily grow with my daughter and last her a long time.

Another game we played was Butterflies. The game was also easily to adapt to meet the needs of different students. Although the game came with each tile flipped over, the instructions showed easier combinations. With the simpler formations that we played, only three tiles were flipped over with the rest upside down showing the blank, blue side. When my daughter only had to focus on getting a few tiles to the right place, she was still stressed at times, but she had more confidence in her decisions because she knew she had a better chance of getting it right. Both games taught my daughter a lot about logic. When I asked Samantha what she learned from playing the games, she explained that she learned to think before she acts. Because the games focused on logic, my daughter gained better strategic thinking skills. The concepts that the games taught can extend to math skills as well as decision making skills in life. In the future, my daughter will continue to play both games with me on family game nights.