How to Improve Your STEM Brain with a Few Fun Games

Playing games is one of the most fun-filled leisure activities that is enjoyed by kids and adults alike. After a long, exhausting week of work or study, you would probably like to take a mental break. Fortunately, there are many ways you can clear your mind while stimulating your brain at the same time. That is when games targeting your STEM brain come in handy. Such games are amusing, engaging, and help promote brain health. Interested to know more? Here is a list of some games that can help stimulate your brain.

Jigsaw Puzzles

Solving puzzles is an incredibly entertaining activity, but did you also know that it has several benefits for your brain? For instance, when you are immersing yourself in a puzzle, the two hemispheres of your brain are engaged in this cognitive workout. It strengthens your memory and boosts your spatial and visual reasoning skills as you are dealing with a scattered picture that you want to make whole.

Word Games

Typically, language-oriented games target your knowledge and vocabulary range. Word games, such as Scrabble, Words with Friends, Wordscapes, and Crosswords, aim at piquing your interest and sense of competition. Searching your vocabulary and memory with any of these games is basically a brain-stretching activity.

There are also games that ask you to unscramble words. Such games that challenge you to find words composed of a certain number of letters. Sometimes formulating words gets too difficult, especially if there are very few or no hints. But don’t fret, you can use helpful tools online from UnscrambleX.com to help you find a word that eludes you.

Sudoku

It is one of the most popular games played by all people from different generations. You may notice a fellow traveler on a train or airplane working at putting numbers in a Sudoku grid. Sudoku is about number placements, memorization, and sequences, and it is available online or on paper. It comes in varying levels of difficulty. You can start with the easy levels and gradually move up you to more advanced levels until you start to master the game.

Card Games

They are many different types of card games. Go Fish, Poker, Crazy Eights, Concentration, and Blackjack, among other card games, have different objectives but all can help you improve your mental skills. You can play them online or offline, either way the fun is all the same. The benefits of playing card games are:

? Boosting Mathematical Skills: through the act of counting cards, adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing their values according to a game’s rules. Often you are learning probability as you guess at the chance a particular card will come up in a deck or is an opponent’s hand.
? Being Socially Active: it lets you form relationships with other players if you are playing in teams, and build a skill in how to divide the roles or strategize. Games like Bridge have formal leagues you can join.
? Strengthening Memory: you can improve your memory by having to keep track of all the cards and potential strategies you and your opponents can during a card game.
Dominoes

Sometimes, simplicity is key; playing dominoes does not need intricate levels of thinking and concentration. But it enables participants to train their skills of strategizing, scanning, and planning. But remember that playing domino games still requires a lot of attention and concentration.

Chess

Nothing can test the mind’s ability to strategize and weigh the costs and benefits of decisions like a good old game of chess. Certainly, this game teaches people how to plan, evaluate, concentrate, and solve problems. It helps develop the brain’s right hemisphere to be more creative. In a game of chess, you need foresight to win which means you have to plan your moves (and guess your opponent’s plan) several steps ahead.

Improving your STEM brain is typically done with mental exercises, studying, and research or hands-on projects. But you can certainly make it more fun by playing games that aim at enhancing your mental capacity. There are so many games that you can choose from to improve your problem solving and cognitive skills as well as to increase your memory. Most games are available online and are easily accessible. So you can try it to see which games are most fun and best suited to you and your friends.