Failure to some may seem like an obstacle but, in reality, it is a milestone on the road to success. For a growing child, failure holds even more importance. It offers them the motivational push that adds to their learning curve.
Unfortunately, there are no games that teach children how to cope with failure. Children often end up fearing failure, which in turn, prevents them from taking up challenges and coping with setbacks.
Try Tower - A Failure Toy for Kids
Thankfully, this lacuna has been filled in by Smartivity, India’s No. 1 STEM toy brand, with its brand new DIY game play kit - Try Tower.
This play toy is based on a combination of STEM and SLE (Social-Emotional Learning) principles, which help children to value failure, work harder, and refine moral skills.
The toy kit comes with a box that you and your kid can quickly assemble with the help of easy instructions. The kit will let them unbox new concepts, holistic learning, and a fun game that is sure to engage their creative side.
How to Play the Game?
The game is simple and can be played by multiple players with little assistance from elders. Here are the highlights:- The game starts with parents assembling the box for their children.
- There are three emotional badges at the bottom, three celebration cards at the top and flags at three levels of the game.
- The aim of a player will be to reach Level 3 by making a tower with building blocks called tazos.
- Once each level is won, the player takes out the flag.
- If the tower falls in between, the player plugs in the try balloon and gets an emotion card as per his/her current state of mind.
- Each badge contains instructions to perform an activity that helps children to cope with the emotion.
- Once level 3 is reached, the player takes out the celebration card and tries to perform as per the instruction.
- Once the gameplay has ended, children are expected to put all the elements of the game within the box and store it for future use.
What are the Benefits of Playing Try Tower?
From boosting critical thinking to refining moral skills, and from building resilience to having a positive attitude towards failure, the benefits of playing are many.
Critical Thinking
The concept of STEM learning is based on solving real-life problems. The goal is not to win at the end but to take away useful life learnings. Smartivity Try Tower boosts critical thinking in children by allowing them to imagine and reimagine multiple possibilities.
Using colourful tiles that can be hooked into each other, the objective is to build a tower as tall as possible. If the tower falls, they can start again, and again to reach new heights with each trial.
Moral Skills
To understand and better appreciate the problem-solving process, it is important to develop empathy and refine moral skills. And what’s better than an exciting toy to polish their moral skills.
The Try Tower comes with emotion badges to help children cope with the emotions they feel after winning or losing. The badges contain a carefully curated list of tasks that the children will perform in order to confront their emotions. The idea behind this is to teach children to cope with failure as well as appreciate success.
Observation Skills
Observation skills and STEM learning are not mutually exclusive. The game teaches them to be totally involved in the gameplay by using all of their senses directly and indirectly. While they observe how the tower grows, they also collect information to make further inferences. They interact with the components differently each time and identify patterns on the basis of their own learnings from the previous trials.
Motor Skills
Research shows that the skills young children develop through STEM concepts in their formative years can have a lifetime impact on their academic journey and development. In particular, STEM helps kids develop their gross and fine motor skills.
Smartivity Try Tower allows children above four years of age to build and balance a tower made of Tazos or building blocks. Building the tower sharpens their motor skills and improves their hand-eye coordination.
Emotional Resilience
Emotional resilience refers to the ability to deal with stressful situations and crises. Those who are resilient are in a better state to deal with both successes and failures calmly. The idea behind the repeated failures in the Try Tower is to make kids develop a constructive relationship with failure.In short, Smartivity Try Tower is a fun way to engage in socio-emotional learning that is bound to broaden your child’s perspectives and alter the way they see successes and failures. As they engage in building a taller tower each time, they also climb up the STEM ladder and make better decisions.
