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Rush Hour to Go!

By Tamara Fisher — December 26, 2009 2 min read
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Many of you, like me, are huge fans of the Rush Hour games. Kids of all ages love them and they are an excellent tool to use with gifted kids (really, any kids... or adults!) to help them develop a desire to persist through a challenge, to “stick with it” when it’s hard rather than cheat or give up. Anyone out there who has worked with gifted kids knows that things often come easily to them. Well, Rush Hour is one excellent tool for helping them learn how to hang with a task long enough to complete it (rather than expecting themselves to always be able to solve something the first or second time they try).

I’m excited to break the news to you today (if you haven’t already heard) that the ThinkFun company (creators and producers of the ORIGINAL and best Rush Hour games) has created a Rush Hour iPhone App! It also works on the iPodTouch, which I happened to purchase for myself about a week before their App became available. Perhaps some of you recently found an iPhone or iPodTouch in your stocking and you’re wondering what are some great Apps to add? Head to the ThinkFun website and click any Rush Hour link which will include a link to add the App.

The FREE version of the Rush Hour App contains 70 total challenges at four different difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard, and expert). The “buy” version is only 99 cents and contains a deliciously full package of 2500 challenges!!! (625 at each of the four difficulty levels)

A new feature that makes solving them even more fun and challenging is the “perfect score” challenge which involves solving each puzzle by moving the cars the minimum possible number of squares.

I’m totally addicted. As a matter of fact, my sister, brother-in-law, and I bought our parents an iPodTouch for Christmas, and today, after showing them the Rush Hour App, I now have my whole family addicted to it, too! There’s five of us fighting over two iPodTouches... Everyone wants to play the game and solve the challenges! Here is my sister demonstrating how frustrating (yet thrilling, too, I promise...!) Rush Hour can be:

Better yet, if you solve - with a perfect score - all 25 of the Easy level challenges in the Free version of the App by December 31st, you can enter a drawing to win a basket of free games (worth about $250) from ThinkFun! Yes, I know, telling all of you about this awesome contest has now decreased my own chances of winning, but that’s okay. You can read “the fine print” about the contest and how to enter at this link on the ThinkFun site.

For those of you who are fascinated, as I am, by the whole development process behind creating these puzzles, I highly recommend that you read “the inside story” at ThinkFun’s site. It’s really amazing just how much goes into making Rush Hour possible.

Entering the contest involves sending a picture to prove that you have solved all 25 of the Easy challenges with a perfect score. Here’s me with my almost-perfect record on the Medium level:

Happy puzzling!

The opinions expressed in Unwrapping the Gifted are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.