Developing Logical Thinking Skills through Puzzles

The ASSET Day Scholar Programme (ADS) is a two-week long exploratory programme in Bangalore that began on April 18th, 2019. It is being conducted by Educational Initiatives Pvt. Ltd. - the company that I currently work with. Children, entering grades 6 and 7, are taking courses that are 6-10 hours in length on a plethora of subjects ranging from scientific enquiry to historical thinking. Students were selected for the programme based on their performance in the ASSET Talent Search examination - an annual talent identification test.

Since teaching is something I am passionate about, I was given the opportunity to design and deliver my own course at the ADS. I decided to centre my course around developing logical thinking skills through puzzles for the following reasons:

• my personal interest in puzzles and logical thinking - I have been an avid puzzle enthusiast since I was about 15 years old and firmly believe that being able to logically think and solve problems is an essential life skill

• the puzzle sessions that I led for my 4th/5th grade students and my 8th/9th grade students as a teacher in Pune (I have linked the relevant posts). When my students worked on puzzles, they were excited and building logical thinking skills without even realising it! I saw how some of the kids labelled as ‘below average’ or ‘weak’ came to life in these sessions and demonstrated strong reasoning abilities. This led to them becoming more confident.

The guiding principle behind my course was simple - through puzzles, I plan to lead children down the path of investigating the underlying thought processes and reasoning involved in methodically working through an unfamiliar problem without guesswork. Strategies (ones that work and ones that fail) and metacognition (i.e. thinking about one's thinking) are the foundational pieces on which we will build our exploration.

I have planned a 7-hour course - the introductory session (1 hour) followed by 3 sessions of 2 hours each. I had my first class with the "Beta" section (there are 3 sections each having 16-17 students) yesterday. Over the coming days, I plan to post details (and hopefully some photographs 😊) of our classroom experiences along with ideas/resources from my session plans. The link to the next post is below.

Session 1 - Section Beta

All posts will be available under the category titled "ASSET Day Scholar Programme".