Mazes! From early childhood, I can remember going into the mirror maze at the Easter Show in my hometown. Although it was scary, I couldn’t help myself, the determination of running around finding the exit was exhilarating. I felt the same when I was solving puzzles in books, first tracing them with my finger, then I start drawing a line to later move the objects and shapes to complete the puzzle.
Our brains generate some neurotransmitters which assist in the overall correspondence within the brain and between the nervous system and the brain.
Puzzles significantly assist our brains in the production of dopamine, a type of neurotransmitter. When the brain responds to either minute or massive breakthroughs, such as puzzle-solving, it releases dopamine. This neurotransmitter causes improved motoring skills, an increase in concentration power, optimism, confidence, and an enhanced recollection.
Enhance Cognitive Skills
Puzzles and mazes improve the cognitive skills of children. They work like brain-boosting exercises. While solving them, makes them think, reason, and remember. Simultaneously achieving all of these sharpens their memory, builds their focus, and increases the concentration level of their minds to a great extent.
Fine Tune Motor Skills and Hand-eye Coordination
Not only does it enhance their cognitive skills, but puzzles that involve physical movement can also improve children’s motor skills. For example, children have to use their fingers to trace the correct path without going over the same line, or using shapes to form one image. Educators believe that completing puzzles also help with handwriting skills.
Strengthen Visual Skills
While some children work best when they can physically act it out, others excel simply by imagining in their heads. Completing puzzles makes you visualize the whole puzzle or maze and look for the best solution. This expands their visual power and the ability to scrutinize complex settings and triumphantly come out of them.
Find Effective Solutions
Whether they are a visual-oriented or physical-oriented problem solver, children devise their own strategies to solve the puzzles or mazes. Some start from the beginning and some trace it from the endpoint. They are learning problem-solving while learning to deal with tricky situations. This may translate to performing better on tests of basic arithmetic.
Virtue of Patience
Puzzles can be complex which may take children a longer time to complete. While doing so, it teaches them the value of persistence that they have to stick around and not give up. It also teaches them that patience will yield good results and their genuine hard work put into something will never be futile.
Build Confidence
Solving puzzles need determination and perseverance, however, just the very fact that they were able to solve it gives them a sense of pride and accomplishment and it lifts their spirits to do more and better the next time.
As we have already seen, there are numerous ways of tackling puzzles that will lead to the same outcome. This goes the same at Kai’s Clan, we always encourage that with the 60+ lesson plans you have numerous ways to complete them with coding, just as having various options to solve real-world problems.
Our latest community project challenges students to build their own 5-Piece Tangram Puzzle.
Enjoy and we hope you have fun!
