Unwrapping the Gifted - December 2009 Archives

December 26, 2009

Rush Hour to Go!

Many of you, like me, are huge fans of the Rush Hour games. Kids of all ages love them and they are an excellent tool to use with gifted kids (really, any kids... or adults!) to help them develop a desire to persist through a challenge, to "stick with it" when it's hard rather than cheat or give up. Anyone out there who has worked with gifted kids knows that things often come easily to them. Well, Rush Hour is one excellent tool for helping them learn how to hang with a task long enough to complete it (rather than expecting themselves to always be able to solve something the first or second time they try).

I'm excited to break the news to you today (if you haven't already heard) that the ThinkFun company (creators and producers of the ORIGINAL and best Rush Hour games) has created a Rush Hour iPhone App! It also works on the iPodTouch, which I happened to purchase for myself about a week before their App became available. Perhaps some of you recently found an iPhone or iPodTouch in your stocking and you're wondering what are some great Apps to add? Head to the ThinkFun website and click any Rush Hour link which will include a link to add the App.

The FREE version of the Rush Hour App contains 70 total challenges at four different difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard, and expert). The "buy" version is only 99 cents and contains a deliciously full package of 2500 challenges!!! (625 at each of the four difficulty levels)
hard challenge.jpg

A new feature that makes solving them even more fun and challenging is the "perfect score" challenge which involves solving each puzzle by moving the cars the minimum possible number of squares.
perfect score.jpg

I'm totally addicted. As a matter of fact, my sister, brother-in-law, and I bought our parents an iPodTouch for Christmas, and today, after showing them the Rush Hour App, I now have my whole family addicted to it, too! There's five of us fighting over two iPodTouches... Everyone wants to play the game and solve the challenges! Here is my sister demonstrating how frustrating (yet thrilling, too, I promise...!) Rush Hour can be:

Better yet, if you solve - with a perfect score - all 25 of the Easy level challenges in the Free version of the App by December 31st, you can enter a drawing to win a basket of free games (worth about $250) from ThinkFun! Yes, I know, telling all of you about this awesome contest has now decreased my own chances of winning, but that's okay. You can read "the fine print" about the contest and how to enter at this link on the ThinkFun site.

For those of you who are fascinated, as I am, by the whole development process behind creating these puzzles, I highly recommend that you read "the inside story" at ThinkFun's site. It's really amazing just how much goes into making Rush Hour possible.

Entering the contest involves sending a picture to prove that you have solved all 25 of the Easy challenges with a perfect score. Here's me with my almost-perfect record on the Medium level:

Happy puzzling!

Posted by Tamara Fisher at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

December 08, 2009

Report from NAGC - Day 4

Greetings and apologies for not getting my Day 4 Report up sooner. After NAGC, I returned home to four nights of parent/teacher conferences, work on my garage that I'm building, giving a couple of presentations, a five-day trip over Thanksgiving, and a five-day family trip to Iowa (in addition, of course, to my job!) Needless to say, I'm working on getting caught up with myself! ;o)

Day 4 (Sunday) at NAGC was a shorter day with two early morning break-out sessions followed by a closing keynote. I didn't attend this year's closing keynote because doing so would've meant getting home at about 1:00 a.m. - and since I had to work two 12-hour days that Monday and Tuesday (parent/teacher conferences), I opted for being a little more refreshed rather than being even more wiped out.

The Sunday breakout sessions were just as wonderful as the other days. The first session I attended on Sunday was about mood and creativity. The presenter, Elizabeth Fairweather, is researching whether or not there is a connection between the two - and if so, what it might be. She's been examining high and low levels of positive and negative mood elements (contentment, surprise, fear, sadness, etc.) and if/how they affect a person's creativity. I realized, through her presentation, that I could be doing more for my students in the way of helping or encouraging them to examine their own moods and how (if at all) they affect their creativity. In particular, I think this would be important to do with my 7th - 12th grade students who work on independent, self-directed projects in my class. Some days, their progress (or lack thereof) on their projects appears to be impacted by their mood. I'm going to encourage the kids now to keep track of their moods and their progress on their projects so that they can determine for themselves which factors and moods are more advantageous (or crippling) to their creative process.

The second breakout session that I attended on Sunday was about a three-credit undergraduate introductory course on gifted & talented students at the University of Toledo. (The person giving the presentation, Jeanine Jechura, teaches the course, if I'm remembering correctly.) Our local tribal college here on the rez usually invites me to speak to the Education majors in their Exceptional Needs class. But I only get about two and half hours with them, rather than an entire semester, so my question after the presentation at NAGC was, "So how do I condense this all into two hours?" I'm well aware that in Montana, those two(-ish) hours of information about gifted students that they get from me might very well be the only exposure/information those future teachers ever get on the topic, so I feel a bit of pressure (self-imposed, I admit) to be as efficiently effective in that short time as possible. I left the NAGC session with a short list of key points and then took that list with me last week when I met with those pre-service teachers at the tribal college. Essentially I gained three overarching goals for my time with those soon-to-be teachers: 1) That they leave with some understanding of key topics/issues in gifted education (social and emotional needs, identification, creativity, school accommodations, mythology, special populations, etc.), 2) That they leave with some empathy for gifted kids and what they sometimes experience in life and in school due to being gifted, and 3) That they leave with a desire for action - to do something for the gifted students who will enter their classrooms someday. And really - I think those are three important and realistic goals for the type and length of presentation I was called upon to give because if they can leave with those three goals more or less accomplished, then they are much more likely in the future to take it upon themselves to seek out any or all of the thousands of pieces of information I didn't have time to impart to them that night.

An additional piece that I add to my presentation at the tribal college is a student panel. With parent permission, I brought in about a dozen of my students, ranging from a 1st grader to a high school junior, to talk from the kid's point of view about being gifted. That is definitely an effective way to accomplish goal #2 (empathy)! The kids (and a few of their parents who stuck around to watch and also talked a bit) really "brought to life" everything I had been talking with the pre-service teachers about during the previous two hours. And the kids appreciate having the opportunity to help future teachers develop some understanding about kids like them before they even get to a classroom.

While I missed the closing keynote at NAGC, I did attend the opening keynote with Josh Waitzkin. (Someone asked in the comments section that I talk about it - so sorry I forgot to in a previous NAGC Report post!) On one hand, I wished the three kids on the stage with him would have had more opportunity to ask Josh questions (they were part of a panel that posed questions to Josh) as well as to speak more themselves. But that aside, what most impressed me about Josh was how he has so thoroughly examined the principles that led him to success in chess and how he then transferred those principles to other areas he wanted to be about equally successful in. He seems like a highly analytical person (makes sense for a chess master!), as well as intense and relatively down-to-earth.
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Plan ahead! Next year the NAGC convention will be in Atlanta, Georgia, November 11-14.

Posted by Tamara Fisher at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Andromeda: I procrastinate because...I'm really kinda lazy? ;) And because historically read more
kcab: Tamara, I have a follow-up question on the topic of read more
Nikki: Thank you so much for posting this. We referenced your read more
Elaine Wellborn: I like your analogy of procrastination and good/bad cholesterol. That read more
Frank Hilton: Tamara, Thank you for your post. Two years have gone read more

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December 26, 2009

Rush Hour to Go!

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Report from NAGC - Day 4

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