Spatial fun with Android apps

Our family amusement with saying "there's an app for that" has finally started to wane... So it must be time to share my findings with you. I've found apps for keeping my shopping lists, collecting all my store loyalty cards and even an to make my phone act like a magnifying glass. I've found apps to turn the Droid into a Kindle and a Bible. But some of my favorite apps are the free (and a few nearly free) games.

Any Droid game app list must begin with my favorite card game for gifted kids of any age: SET. (search the Market for Set Enterprises to get the real game). SET is the ultimate visual matching game. Match (or don't match) the shape, color, number and fill of the icons on each card to create sets of three cards where each of those characteristic is either the same or different on all three cards. But don't hand your phone to your gifted child... You may never get it back! Even with the SET app on my Droid, we still love to play the real SET card game at home.

How about a game of mirrors? Chromatron is the game of laser and mirror puzzles. Can you place and rotate the mirrors, combine the lasers, mirrors and filters to combine and separate colors, and reach all the targets in each tableau? Puzzles teach new skills along the way, like combining and splitting beams to create new colors. And then the puzzles really get Tricky!

Vexed Pro is a free chain reaction gravity puzzle. The puzzle is to get rid of all the cubes by sliding or dropping 2, 3 or 4 cubes into adjacent positions; touching matched cubes makes them disappear. Make each puzzle a little harder by making par, solving  the puzzle in the least number of moves possible. There are thousands of puzzles, from Beginner to Impossible and every level in between! Vexed Pro will keep you entertained for a very long time!

Rush Hour is a well known diversion for gifted kids (and their parents) from Thinkfun. In Rush Hour, puzzles get progressively harder as you try to free the red car from the traffic logjam. Cars can only move forwards and backwards, and may start the puzzle facing north-south or east-west, complicating the gridlock. The free version offers dozens of challenges, and the paid version, hundreds more. Rush Hour is must have for any Droid.

Space Physics is a Rube Goldberg puzzle combined with gravity. Can you move the ball to the goal wheel by adding shapes and forces to move it along? Draw quickly, or the ball will fall off the screen! But fear not, you can always start over. Again, the free version offers many challenges, but in case you run out, there's a paid version with tons more fun!

My latest find is Bubble Blast II. Another free app, Bubble Blast II challenges you to clear all the bubbles on the board with the least number of "touches." A touch turns the bubble touched to the next larger size and color, and if  the bubble turns red, it sends off chain reaction  bubble touches in all four directions. The puzzles start very simply, and get successively tougher. You can retry each puzzle as often as you like, but you will have to solve it to move on to the next harder puzzle.

Bubble Blast II even offers clues, but you can only receive one clue every 24 hours, and I suspect it will lower your overall score... I didn't try it to find out. There's also an arcade mode where time is of the essence. I'm more of a puzzle person myself.

Looking for a game that combines words and spatial strategy? Try Words with Friends! A favorite iPhone app now available on the Android too, Words with Friends lets you play that famous Hasbro word game with your friends on either phone platform, in your own time. Have a few minutes to wait at the doctor's office? Play your turn. Your friend (or a random stranger, if you choose) takes their turn when they have a chance. It's a fast way to turn a minute of lost time into a thought-provoking social activity!

That's all for today... I'm sure these games will give every Android user more than a few hours of lost, or saved, time. Next column, great word games for the Android.

And if anyone would like to offer Hoagies' Page an iPad or iPod Touch, we will offer similar columns for iApps! ;-)

If we don't tell them they're gifted, they'll never know

It's the hot topic of the week... should we identify the gifted child as "gifted?"  Should we label him?  Once she's identified, should we share the "gifted" label with her?  Or should we ignore this aspect of the child, hide the identification if we do become aware of it, and pretend that there is nothing unique about the gifted child?

The answer is so obvious, it makes me wonder why we're asking the question!

Let me ask this another way. If you have a son, do you label him a boy?  If you don't, will he eventually figure it out?  You bet!  What if your daughter is good at soccer?  Do you help her grow and hone her skills, sign her up for clinics to improve her play, and allow her to try-out and play in the elite travel soccer team?  Or do you have her stay in local youth soccer, playing alongside the average soccer players instead, as her soccer peers go off to the travel team?

The answer is clear.  We can't hide the child from himself for very long; to think we can is just silly.  That boy is going to figure out that he is more like the other boys than like the other girls.  There are obvious physical differences. The child may be a boy, blond, brown-eyed and tall, and not telling the child that he is all of these things will not change that he is.  And he will certainly figure it out for himself.

How about that young soccer star?  No one tells a parent of a child who has a talent in sports not to label the child talented in that arena.  No one frowns at the parent who allows his child to play in elite programs or encourages his child through advanced skill clinics. No one counsels the parent, "No, don't enroll your child in the travel soccer team; it might make her age-peers in the youth soccer league feel bad."

But isn't this exactly what is asked of the parents of gifted children?  Some education professionals suggest that we should not identify our gifted children at all, that gifted identification creates excessive expectations for the gifted child.  These excessive expectations of their teachers and parents might pressure the child in ways that aren't good for her, ways that might "take away her childhood."  Others tell us that, once identified, we should not share that identification or its implications with the gifted child.  "Don't tell your son he's gifted, it might give him a big head."  "Don't put your child in the gifted program; it might make the kids in the regular classroom feel bad."

If we do not label the child "gifted," he'll never know, right?  Wrong.  Gifted kids are different.  The differences vary from child to child.  Often, the gifted child is more sensitive than his age-peers.  What is the gifted child to think?  I'm supposed to be just like them, but none of them care about or even notice the homeless people on the street, none of them are overwhelmed by the bright lights and loud noises in the school gym... Why am I so different?  And as the gifted child quickly learns, different is bad.  Suddenly we've gone from not telling the child he's gifted, to giving the child the impression that he is bad.  We should never do that to a child!

If we ignore the talents the gifted child shows in academics, and we do not encourage him to join the gifted classroom or program... what are we saying to the child?  Kids, all kids, need encouragement.  They need to know they're accepted for who they are.  They need to stretch, to learn and to grow.  The parents of that young soccer star know that, and they enroll her in the travel soccer team to get that encouragement and growth.  But the parents of the gifted boy are not supposed to label their son "gifted" and enroll their him in the gifted program, where he might be accepted, encouraged, and learn to stretch his abilities?

Why not?

Carolyn K.

Who, me? Opinions??

Welcome to my blog!  Wow, that sounds funny to say.  I swore I would not get started blogging.  I mean, do I really need another thing to do with my time?  There's the website, and now the Facebook page, and my family, not in that order, of course.  That's more than enough for a disabled mom to handle.  And who would want to read my posts anyhow?  I don't know the answer to that one, but I guess we'll find out together.

As most of you know, I'm passionate and opinionated about Gifted Education.  And as many of you know, I'm not very skilled at keeping my mouth shut.  What better way is there to share our passion and our opinions than to blog about it?

So here we are together, you and I, writing and reading my first blog post.  I hope that you'll follow me along this journey, and share my passion for "all things gifted."  And I hope that at least a little bit of what I say can help you, your children, your students, your teachers, and our world to be a better place for our gifted children and the amazing adults they grow up to become!  And the adults WE grow up to become!  (Imposter syndrome is a subject we'll definitely discuss here.)

Welcome to Hoagies' Nibbles and Bits, a blog about... well, about whatever I'm feeling passionate about at the moment. Mostly, that's likely to be about gifted children, and gifted education, and gifted parenting. Once in a while, I'm sure there will be posts on other subjects, too. Feel free to comment on my posts; I would love to know what you're thinking, and what you think of my opinions. Let's take this journey together!

Carolyn K.