How to develop child’s talents and adult’s ability to think courageously, creatively, and originally? Modern era brings the challenge of constant knowledge enhancement. So, the questions how to develop your own creative thinking and to prepare children for such a rapid tempo of life become extremely important. Different puzzle games, riddles, brain teasers and logic questions help to develop creat
ive skills and so produce new ideas, think originally and see a problem in general. When combined correctly, these mind games shape the ability to analyse and synthesise, generalise and concretise, abstract and transfer, classify, compare and single out most essential. They also teach one think by analogy, see differences and regularities, find cause and effect relationships, think by association and search for non-standard approaches to solving problems. The program preserves the principle of spirality and cyclic recurrence. The important feature of this program is its orientation at the achievements of modern psychology. Many exercises prepare students for tests, which are known and are widely used in many countries. The similar tasks often occur in the international tests, intelligence tests, admission tests to colleges and universities, and at the job interviews. All riddles for kids and adults develop different types and forms of thinking: productive, cognitive, logical, heuristic, spatial and many more. Olga His, the author of methodology, dedicated more than 10 years of her research and pedagogical activity to the following problem: how to teach children and adults to think and to be creative? She developed and implemented a teaching program on logic and non-standard thinking. This is an integrated course, elaborated at the interface of logic, mathematics, and psychology. The program is oriented at the development of the main aspects of cognitive activity and aims at stimulating people’s thinking, teaching basic operations of thinking, developing quick-wittedness, spatial imagination, memory, and attention. Furthermore, it takes into account the development of basic aspects of thinking on both verbal and non-verbal levels. So, start solving puzzles today and become more creative tomorrow!
