Does a Rubik's Cube Make Your Kids Smart?

Every parent would want his child to have the best education possible. For most parents, good education spells future success for their children. Introducing kids to play as a way of learning can rouse their interest in the alphabet, numbers, colors, animals, and others things. Exposing children to education at an early age will activate their hidden talents and help propel them to future success.

Books are good tools for learning. However, kids can sometimes find books rather boring that after they finish reading it, they just place it inside the shelf to accumulate dust, never to be read again. There is one toy however, which only costs a few dollars, but engages kids to think-not just plain thinking, but analyzing.

The Rubik's Cube was designed by Erno Rubik in 1974 as a device to help young students learn and understand three-dimensional geometry. Little did he know that his little cube would soon become the world's best-selling toy; 35 million pieces having been sold since the start of its mass production. The Rubik's Cube is a cube with different colors on every flat surface. It is a game of algorithm and logic. The idea is to make each surface of the cube a solid color. This part is the most extremely challenging. A standard Rubik's Cube measuring 3X3 can present 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible scenarios, but there is ultimately one solution for all these scenarios.

What can a Rubik's cube possibly teach your child? Your child's first lesson, and one which he can use later in his life, is the virtue of patience. For a beginner, solving the Rubik's cube can take hours, weeks, months, or maybe even never, except if the person playing is a super genius. The world record holder by the way, who is also a super genius, is Yu Nakajima of Japan, completing the puzzle in just 8.72 seconds!

Your kids will also learn logical reasoning and discipline from playing with a Rubik's Cube. Your child's brain will be subconsciously trained to think systematically and logically as he analyzes each twist and turn of the cube. Discipline is what keeps him playing. Without discipline and patience, an average player would throw the toy away from utter frustration.

If you would like your child to have a bright future with building structures like an engineer or an architect, for example, then introduce him to the Rubik's Cube early in his childhood. The design of the Rubik's Cube alone will leave him analyzing and imagining, making his brain do mental pushups.

Playing with a Rubik's Cube boosts your child's spatial intelligence. But what exactly is spatial intelligence? Spatial intelligence is the ability to visualize the mind's eye. It is the ability to solve problems of navigation, visualization of angles, scenes, faces and recognition of finer details. Like a potter or sculptor, a player can visualize the end-result of every twist and turn of the cube.