Logic games for children: what to give at each age and what not to
Which puzzles make sense at 6, at 9 and at 12, why a 4x4 sudoku beats a 9x9 as a starting point, and the mistake of giving a hint too soon.
Logic puzzles have an unusual advantage for a children's activity: you need to know nothing to start. A 4×4 sudoku requires no reading, no adding up, no prior study. It only requires noticing something.
That is exactly the feeling you are after: the click. The moment a child says «ah, so the 3 has to go there because it cannot go anywhere else». Nobody taught them that, they deduced it, and it is a different experience from getting an answer right.
Here is what tends to work at each age, and above all what does not.
From 5 to 7
At this age the aim is not difficulty, it is understanding that there is a rule.
A 4×4 sudoku, with pictures or colours instead of numbers. Four rows, four columns, four 2×2 quadrants. The whole sudoku rule fits in one sentence — «no repeats in the row or the column» — and with four symbols you can hold it in your head without writing anything.
Shape sequences. Circle, square, circle, square, and now what? It is the same muscle as the number sequences in adult aptitude tests, but with no numbers.
A very short word search, six by six with four words. It also reinforces reading without feeling like reading.
What does not work: anything with a clock, and any large grid. A 9×9 board at six years old is not difficult, it is overwhelming, which is not the same thing.
From 8 to 11
Here you can start asking them to hold several conditions at once, which is the real step up.
A 6×6 sudoku and then 9×9. The 6×6 is the rung almost everybody skips and the one that stops the 9×9 being a wall.
Logic riddles with clues. The classics of «five children, five favourite colours, and these clues». It is the first time they meet the fact that a negative clue («Marta is not the one in blue») gives as much information as a positive one, and that is a genuine intellectual discovery.
Short anagrams. Rearranging the letters of a four or five letter word. Vocabulary and mental flexibility at once.
Simple number sequences. 2, 4, 6, 8… and then 1, 2, 4, 7, 11, which already requires looking at the differences. We wrote a whole guide on this aimed at adults, but the method of writing the differences underneath works just as well at ten.
From 12 onwards
At this age the problem is no longer capability, it is interest. They are competing with far more stimulating things, and a puzzle book has every chance of losing if it is presented as homework.
What does hook at this age is logic with a story. Deduction puzzles of the «who was left alone with the victim» kind work much better than an abstract grid, because there is something to find out rather than something to fill in. Our Criminoku is exactly that: five suspects, a grid, some clues and a culprit. The mechanics are those of a classic logic riddle, but with a case behind them.
Also effective at this age is anything with a daily challenge rather than an infinite book: one puzzle a day gets done, fifty available puzzles do not.
The three commonest mistakes
1. Giving the hint too soon. The hardest to avoid. You see the child stuck for two minutes and it comes out by itself: «look at that row». You have just removed exactly the part that was doing the work. Being stuck is the exercise. If you must step in, a question beats a hint: «which numbers can no longer go here?».
2. Starting hard so they do not get bored. It almost always backfires. A puzzle that is too hard teaches nothing, because the click never happens; it only produces the conclusion that «I am no good at this».
3. Turning it into a chore. The moment there is a compulsory quantity per day, it is over. Better that they ask for another than that they fill a quota.
Paper or screen
For the youngest, paper nearly always: you see everything at once, you can rub it out, and there is no interface to learn before you start thinking. We have printable puzzles, including a word search maker you can feed whatever words you like — the names of the class work very well.
From about ten, the screen has one concrete advantage: it marks itself, and that lets them try without fear of spoiling the sheet.
The fifteen puzzles are in the web version, free and in the browser.