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Carving BLOX is a world where the user creates a game board and then sends various balls into motion. All of these activities have various levels of difficulty which can be controlled with a slider bar. Stocktopus engages the user in a trading game Fripple Place asks the user to place the fripples in the correct rooms based on various clues and Photo Twister has 22 special effects which are used to distort a picture. Designed for students in grades 3-8, the five activities help youngsters strengthen problem solving skills, explore physics concepts and learn beginning computer programming skills.
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Thinkin' things collection 3 by Edmark is another superb entry to the problem solving software arena. In addition, this column contains a number of wonderful materials I have reviewed over the summer. I highly suggest that you preview these materials if you are looking for software in these areas (see sidebar with winners). I was delighted to find that several of the winners in the education categories have already been reviewed in these pages and are scheduled for this column. Teachers can use the "grow slide" to see what their students are learning, to set a particular level, or select a particular exercise.WELCOME BACK TO ANOTHER school year! During the interim since the last column, I had the pleasure of serving as one of 100 software reviewers to help with the Software Publishers Association Codie Award judging. Thinkin' Things assesses a student's capabilities as they participate in activities and automatically adjusts the difficulty level as students progress. Is a particular student more likely to remember what is seen or what is heard? How do they approach learning? Do they “guess and test?” Once something is “discovered,” do they use that information in another way to “see what happens?”ĭo they, for example, prefer to take Fripple orders at the door (both auditory and visual), on the phone (auditory only), or by mail (visual only)? Thinkin’ Things promotes learning in each student’s areas of strength while encouraging growth and building skills in other areas as well. Thinkin’ Things also focuses attention on how students learn. In areas that may not come as naturally to some children, Thinkin’ Things offers warm, friendly experiences in which self-confidence is built, exploration and creativity are fostered, and persistence is rewarded with success. A student’s musical and rhythmic intelligence may shine when working with Toony the Loon and his xylophones, or visual and spatial intelligence in creating with BLOX, or logical and mathematical intelligence with the Fripple Guides and Feathered Friends. Thinkin’ Things celebrates intellectual diversity.
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Students blend music, art, science, and play as they experiment with motion and the illusion of depth, creating works of kinetic art as they control the motion of shapes and the sounds they make.įOR EDUCATORS - MORE ABOUT THINKIN' THINGS Students will learn about attributes, differences, patterns and analogies.įor a fun-filled lesson in Boolean logic, students visit the Fripple Shop and fill customer orders for Fripples while learning to observe, compare, contrast and recognize relationships. Young learners will need to put on their thinking caps to create the missing bird in the series. For an even greater auditory challenge, students can ask Oranga to play in the dark! Students need to watch and listen carefully as Oranga Banga plays on his funky drum set, and then repeat what he plays.
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They create their own memorable melodies with Toony’s wacky xylophones: glasses, strings, hollow logs, and even squawking chickens! Students build auditory and visual memory as they repeat Toony the Loon’s musical patterns. Click on the "Software MacKiev's Web Site" link at the bottom of this page. With all instructions spoken by the characters, reading is not required so that non-readers can participate fully.įREE LEARNING GUIDE - A teacher's guide is available from the Thinkin' Things site. Set in Toony the Loon’s Lagoon, early learners encounter colorful, fun characters as they complete challenges that are automatically adjusted to meet individual learning needs. As they master the basic skills of the three R’s, they must now also develop a broader, higher-level set of thinking skills that will transfer to the workplace of the future.Įdmark® Thinkin' Things was designed to offer young students experiences with a variety of just such thinking skills: memory, critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity - in short, all the twenty-first century skills that today's young learners need. Our children will live and work in an Information Age that we can only begin to imagine.
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