Top Letters: A VERY intense four minutes!

After my previous entry about Summer Activities With Educational Value, I thought I wouldn't be posting any more until the fall. However, I needed to make a quick addendum to the previous post. In that post I stated that the Quote Puzzler site has six games. That number is now up by one, with the addition of Top Letters.

This is a timed game in which players have four minutes in which to create words from a set of twenty letters. Each letter is assigned a point value (the same point value used in Scrabble and Word Builder. However, there is a slight catch...if you build a word in the top row, its value is multiplied by four. If you build a word in the second row, its value is multiplied by three. If you build a word in the third row, its value is multiplied by two, and if you build a word in the last row, it counts at face value.

The competition on this new game is fierce, and one member described the game as: a VERY intense four minutes!

Summer Activities With Educational Value

What are you going to do this summer? What will your children do? Will your summer activities be purely recreational? Or will they have educational value?

Let's think about some things that you and/or your children can do that will be both fun and valuable.

First, though you might not expect to hear it from someone who runs an educational website, let me begin by saying: Go OUTSIDE! I mean it. Really. The summer is too short, and the weather is too nice to spend all your time indoors. Go to the beach. Climb a mountain. Visit a living history site. Do something that lets you enjoy and appreciate the wonders of nature and the outdoors.

As I study my webstats (information on the traffic that comes to The Problem Site) I am pleased by the number of people who visit this site and spend fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes playing the educational games on this site. Once in awhile, though, I see something that I don't like as much: I see statistics on visitors who come to the site and spend three hours straight playing Hangman. Not that there's anything wrong with hangman - it's a great game - but really...THREE HOURS?

Don't waste away your summer staring at a computer screen for hours on end.

Can I give you a suggestion? Consider limiting your time at The Problem Site to the time it takes to solve the Daily Puzzles. This is a set of four puzzles (three word games, one math game) that will take just a couple minutes to do.

Or, if you like the challenge of competing against others, spend some time each day at Quote Puzzler. Quote Puzzler has six daily word games. Four of the games are timed competitions, and two are untimed.

How much time does it take to do all of these puzzles? Well, let's take a look at some averages. The following statistics came from averaging all the puzzle solvers' times over the last couple months:

Quote Puzzler: Average time per day: 4:38
Triplet Scramble: Average time per day: 2:52
Secret Word: Average time per day: 2:32
Cross Phrase: Average time per day: 0:42

That works out to a little over ten minutes per day (throw in Word Builder and In And Out, and you've got about 15 minutes of brain workout. That's a great way to start your day. And the good thing is, once you've finished the daily puzzles, there's nothing there to tempt you into killing your entire day on the site.

But be warned...you'll find yourself coming back again and again to see how you ranked...

Also, I'd like to direct your attention to one more site: Amateur-Hikers.com. This is an entirely free website that allows visitors to post reports of hikes they've done anywhere in the world. (Here's my most recent report: Hiking Pleasant Mountain.) This can become a great project for you and your child/children to work on together. Are you going hiking somewhere this summer? Take a notebook, and jot down information you'll need to write a useful report. Your children will get to combine outdoor activities with writing and reporting, and in the process, you'll help other hikers who follow in your footsteps!

Finally, I want to mention that this site will be running on "autopilot" for a good part of the summer, as I will be away speaking at various camps and churches for most of the summer. If you send an email through this site, it may take awhile for me to answer it! Have a wonderful summer, and I'll catch you all on the other side, when school kicks into gear again!