Recent research suggests that games, in general, play a fundamental role in learning at all ages: they allow us to acquire rules, organize ideas and thoughts, and manage unpredictable situations.
Puzzle games, such as Sudoku, series completion, and cryptography, are useful for developing and maintaining good logical reasoning skills, as they lead us to formulate and apply a set of rules to ever new and different situations.
However, puzzle games must be constantly varied, because this prevents us from repeating already known strategies, forcing us to always develop new ones.
However, puzzle games are not enough to keep our minds in shape.
It is important to practice different types of exercises (linguistic, mathematical, mnemonic, creative) that stimulate us to think “laterally”, that is, to formulate reasoning that has never been used before.
The ability to solve problems and make advantageous choices is based on the characteristics of logical thinking, which can be described as the ability to identify salient relationships between information in the environment, to derive rules, models, concepts and behavior patterns.
These elements can be extended to new and previously unexperienced situations, or can be used to draw specific conclusions from a set of given premises.
The typical steps of logical processes are:
– the identification of relevant elements within the situation
– the identification of analogies and/or relationships
– the classification and formulation of concepts
– completion, that is, the extension of concepts formulated in relation to a situation to similar situations
