Highly Recommended Game for Gifted Children!

If your gifted child likes to build or is fascinated with the way things work, we HIGHLY recommend the game "Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions".  We bought this Windows-based game for our family computer years ago, and it has provided tons of fun ever since.

The Incredible Machine (often abbreviated as TIM) is a problem solving game in the form of Rube Goldberg-style contraptions to do a certain task and that are almost complete, but not quite: the player has to pick out and place items on the contraption that make it work.  For a very simple example, you have a contraption that starts with a ball at the top of an incline, and your task is to get the ball into a bucket at the bottom of the incline: you have to pick an item from a toolbag that will push the ball down the incline, such as a fan that blows the ball into motion.

The often whimsical collection of items you can use in your contraptions includes balls, inclines, balloons, candles, mice, conveyor belts, cats, pulleys, ropes, an anti-gravity pad, and much more.  The really neat thing is that the items behave according to real world physical principles: if you push a ball over an edge, it falls and accelerates properly.  Bouncing items deflect at proper angles.  You can also make adjustments to environmental properties--such as gravity and air pressure--to change your contraption's behavior, as if your puzzle was on the moon or in space.

The Incredible Machine allows single player and dual players racing against each other to solve a task.  It comes with several hundred ready-to-solve puzzles, and players can build their own contraptions just for fun.  Players can even experiment with the game's background music.  This is a very well thought out game.

Obviously TIM fosters problem solving skills and makes it easy (and fun) to demonstrate basic physical sciences.  If your gifted child is a budding physicist or engineer, they will enjoy this game immensely, as will the adults.

Gifted Children and Learning

Wow, how easily time can get away from you; it seems like just last week that we wrote our last blog, but that was actually back in October. Suddenly our weekends got busy, we even had a wedding in the family (Chuck's brother Dan), and voila! we're in the holidays!

Well, the fifth and final blog in our series of telling gifted children from bright children considers how gifted children learn. Unlike some of the other qualities of gifted children we've blogged about, a cliché about gifted children is fairly true here: gifted children seem to just "get it" more easily than other children. A bright child will master a task in 6 to 8 repetitions, but a gifted child will master the same repetition in 1 to 3 repetitions.

Think of learning multiplication tables. Bright children study their tables, review them with their parents and peers, and cite repetitions with their teacher; a table might be mastered in a few weeks through memorization driven by that repetition. The gifted child might only need to be exposed to a table, from which they recognize and infer patterns, and only after a minimal number of repetitions, they haven’t just memorized the table, they “know” it.

Repetition, in fact, tends to frustrate a gifted child, or instill boredom at the least. We saw this frequently with our own children. After all, few of us would want to read the same paragraph of text over and over, even once we’ve memorized it. These frustrations and boredom may come out as behavioral problems or with the child being regularly distracted and disconnected with their coursework.

We said a moment ago that gifted children don’t just memorize concepts, they “know” them. This is an important distinction, as it allows the gifted child to extrapolate concepts beyond what’s been exposed to them. Using the multiplication tables example again, once a gifted child has mastered up to the 3’s, they may not even require exposure to the 4’s and later. They have learned not only the table but also the underlying concepts of multiplication and they can infer tables that haven’t been exposed to them yet. They can manipulate and apply their newly acquired knowledge much more easily and cohesively than other children.

This ability to infer and extrapolate results in gifted children being able to produce material of an innovative and original nature. This isn’t true only of analytical topics such as multiplication tables; creatively gifted children will produce creative material of an original nature. Other children (and adults) who don’t understand might perceive that material as “weird” or “out there”, and it’s no doubt that gifted children—particularly creatively gifted—can march to the beat of a different drummer.

We hope that this series has been useful to you, and we hope that it helps a gifted child that you know. We’d like to hear from you about your experiences with your gifted child; you can post a comment here or you can email us at giftedgalaxy@gmail.com. We’d love suggestions for topics, but we’d most like to hear about your gifted child!