Using Lateral Thinking Puzzles
Help Your Child Become Smarter and More Confident
Some of the best ways to encourage your child's lateral thinking skills are through puzzles, riddles, and other mind games. They also help build confidence.
Lateral thinking puzzles are basically the ability to solve problems using non-traditional methods in order to create and identify new concepts and ideas. By using puzzles, riddles, and other mind exercises, students are able to think of new ways to find solutions to problems by thinking outside of the box.
Solve this Puzzle
A man and his son are in a car accident. Both survive, but while the father is still being extricated from the car, the son is rushed to the hospital. When he arrives, the surgeon says, "I can't operate on this boy, he is my son!" How is this possible?
The solution to this puzzle is below this article.
Whether you got this puzzle immediately or you are still reasoning with it, this is an example of a lateral thinking puzzle. Lateral thinking puzzles can be text puzzles like the one above, where you must fill in missing information to make the scenario make sense to find a sensible solution. They can also be visual problems that sometimes require the use of other objects such as a pen or pencil or toothpicks to solve. Two examples of visual problems are offered below for you to print out.
Here are some ways that lateral thinking puzzles can help students.
Generate Ideas
Students are forced to think about solutions when working on lateral thinking puzzles. They have to stretch their imaginations and think of possible angles for each puzzle, thus strengthening their problem solving skills. It keeps their minds sharp and lets them know that there is not always a concrete answer to every problem.
Make Better Choices
Learning with traditional textbooks is a necessary form of learning, but it leaves students to just memorizing correct answers. Sometimes students can fall into the thinking that every situation has a right and wrong answer. Obviously this is not the case. Students will ask more questions and use their analytical skills when solving lateral thinking puzzles. Asking questions leads to students analyzing if there are different and better ways of doing things. It broadens their perspective on subjects they are not familiar with and they become more comfortable with wanting to know more.
Build Self Confidence
Lateral thinking puzzles are a great way for students to level the playing field with adults. When an adult and a student are given the same puzzle that both have never seen, they need to think and work on their solutions sometimes using different angles and thought processes. A student who is used to lateral thinking is apt to be more comfortable with their solution and may get it quicker than an adult who has not been exposed to this type of learning style. This can really help build self-esteem in students.
Solution to Puzzle
The surgeon is the boy's mother.
