Scotch Reports Issue 174 (April 2019)

Mind Lab
As a school that has wellbeing central to its
core mission, would it ever be appropriate
or desirable to encourage children to push,
overwhelm, capture or defeat others?
Surprisingly, yes! The context is Mind
Lab, a range of strategic thinking games
introduced at Year 5 & 6.
Mind Lab was founded in 1994 and has a
presence in more than 30 countries, with
a suite of strategy games that promote
competencies valuable for life at and
beyond school. In the same way that
chess teaches the skills of problemsolving,
strategizing, planning, foresight,
concentration and focus, Mind Lab games
provide our students with a context in
which they develop their thinking abilities
along with social and emotional skills.
The general objectives of the Mind Lab
program are:
• Encourage consolidation of concrete
operations of thought.
• Improve the strategies of action
governed by the rules of the game and
by the actions of another.
• Develop the ability to cope operatively
with the rules of the games.
• Help overcome the limits of concrete
thinking.
• Enhance communication skills –
capture, analysis and expression of
information.
• Promote the development of strategies
for planning and orderly execution
of actions.
• Encourage recognition and management
of available resources.
• Develop the ability to deal with
frustration and satisfaction.
The overall objective is for students to
draw on the social and emotional strategies
they develop through the games and
apply them to the more complex problem
situations they face beyond the board
game, especially at the beginning of
adolescence.
Once students learn each board game, its
key concepts and its associated tactics,
they are encouraged to ‘think about
their thinking’ (metacognition) in order
to transfer skills to real-life contexts. The
methodology has been supported through
research conducted by Yale University,
USA, and Northumbria, England.
Throughout the first term, it has not
been uncommon to find clusters of Year
6 students huddled over game boards
before school, at recess and at lunchtime,
challenging each other to ‘Abalone’,
‘Olympic Checkers’, ‘Quoridor’ and ‘Octi’.
This year, we challenged all Year 6 students
to compete in their ‘best’ game in a knock
out in-house competition, in order to
qualify for our first inter-school team. The
aim was not only to stretch our students to
compete in high-level competition locally
and, ambitiously, beyond, but to enjoy
interacting with other students and seek
leisure games beyond the screen.
Congratulations to Ollie Ryder for
achieving a silver medal at the interschool
competition!
IEVA HAMPSON
Head of Micham Campus
01 Strategizing in a game of Octi / 02 A round
of Abalone underway / 03 Quoridor in Action
/ 04 Olympic Checkers is popular amongst the
Year 6s / 05 Quoridor in Action
01 02 03
04 05
11