A Tale of Two Playgrounds
Puzzle Playground is a new brain-training site from the publisher of Math Playground. Designed as a companion site to Math Playground, Puzzle Playground is packed with fun logic puzzles, challenging brain workouts, and engaging skill games. Our games and puzzles involve logic, strategy, spatial reasoning, creative thinking, pattern recognition, and problem solving. They invite students to test ideas, grapple with complexity, think outside of the box, and become better problem solvers. New games are added each week.
Carefully crafted tasks are at the heart of Puzzle Playground. These fun, colorful puzzles provide far more than entertaining challenges. They give students opportunities to interact with a wide variety of problem solving tools. While exploring game environments, students analyze cause and effect situations and apply trial and error strategies. They collect information and make decisions. They reason about numbers and make estimations.
Puzzle Games
Our puzzle games provide rich opportunities for students to apply logic, think visually, handle complexity, and manipulate shapes. Reach the Flag, pictured above, focuses on spatial reasoning. Students are asked to help Noah reach the flag across 64 increasingly difficult puzzles. To be successful, Noah must step on every block along the path. Yellow blocks will fall to the ground when they are stepped on. Tan blocks can be stepped on twice. Light gray blocks remain where they are. Students must work with the characteristics of each block, find the best path, and reach the flag.
Strategy Games
Strategy games invite students to make decisions, plan moves, test ideas, and revise their actions. Fillness, pictured above, is a space filling puzzle in which robots create green tiles. Students must use the robots' unique attributes to completely cover the factory floor with the tiles. Order matters in this logic-based puzzle game.
Adventure Games
Adventure games provide a story-like environment where students can look for patterns, solve problems, and reason spatially. Big Tall Small, pictured above, is a problem solving puzzle. Students are tasked with guiding the characters to the exit portal. Each character has an attribute that is uniquely suited to handle the problems they encounter along the way. Characters can act together or alone to tackle each obstacle.
Using Puzzle Playground in the Classroom
To use Puzzle Playground in your classroom, display a game or puzzle on a white board and invite the whole class to participate. Later, you can challenge students to complete the game or puzzle on their own. Extend the learning by asking your students to write about the game. Did they enjoy it? Why or why not? How would they make it more fun? Creative students may be inspired to design their own games. The possibilities are endless. During free time, encourage students to explore other types of problem solving games. Puzzle Playground has a wide variety of game themes, from classic puzzles to space explorations.
