Teacher Stories: Visionaries

Visionary Barbara Ross

ThinkFun Game Club grew out of a pioneering school program developed by Barbara Ross, Gifted Resource Teacher at Colvin Run Elementary School in Vienna, Virginia. This program, called Strategies Lab, has been at Colvin Run since the school was founded in 2002. It is a center based program visited by classrooms for 50 minute periods during school hours. It is proving so successful that for this year, every student in the school, Kindergarten through sixth grade, attends Strategies Lab two times each month. Barbara is a visionary teacher, and this program is really something special.

The Colvin Run Strategies Lab starts, like Game Club, with really fun puzzles and games that children love to play. However, this lab contains over 150 different games from all around the world... an amazing collection of all the best games and puzzles of this generation. The emphasis in Strategies Lab is to expose students to as wide a range of different thinking strategies and play patterns as possible, celebrating the abundance of great ideas and having the most fun doing it. At its heart, Strategies Lab teaches Metacognition... thinking about thinking.

The program encourages students to talk about their thinking processes, using educational models including Costa's Habits of Mind. Students who have now spent two or three years exposed to Strategies Lab are reported to be better, more fluid and natural thinkers than kids in other schools. After four years, the loud and clear message from the Colvin Run PTO is, "MORE STRATEGIES LAB!".

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Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner is a friend to Bill Ritchie, CEO and founder of ThinkFun, and me, Tanya Thompson, Director of Education Programs for ThinkFun. Martin has been responsible for shaping the minds of many of the great mathematicians of today. Martin wrote an influential column in Scientific American called "Mathematical Games" from 1956 to 1981. He also wrote over 60 books and is still publishing new materials up to this day.

When Bill and I visited Martin this past spring, we told him about our plans with ThinkFun Game Club. Martin was thrilled. He thought it was a wonderful way to teach problem solving to children. Games, puzzles, magic tricks, etc... have always felt to Martin like a very important way to teach children mathematics. In his Mathematical Carnival, from 1975, he wrote, "The best way, it has always seemed to me, to make mathematics interesting to students ... is to approach it in a spirit of play. ... Surely the best way to wake up a student is to present him with an intriguing mathematical game, puzzle..." [1, pp. xi-xii].

We are very happy to have Martin's blessing for ThinkFun Game Club and we are honored to have such a mathematical icon as our supporter.

[1] Martin Gardner, 1975 Mathematical Carnival: A new Round-up of Tantalizer and Puzzles from "Scientific American", Knopf Publishing Group, 1975