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13 Reasons Why Tetris is a Game Your Kids Should Learn and Play 

Last Updated on January 7, 2024 by Gamesver Team and JC Franco

Tetris 99 video game box and Nintendo Switch
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Tetris is undeniably a fun game to play, whether you’re old or young. In fact, it has been a popular go-to game for those who like the satisfaction of organizing things and getting rewarded for it. In this game, the reward is a clear space made available for the next line of blocks. The game requires players to stack blocks and clear lines for as long as possible and prevent stacks from getting too big. If the stacks pile up for long enough and reach the top of the screen, the game is over. 

Tetris is recommended for children aged six and older. While it seems like a simple and easy way to engage your children for some time, one may wonder if there are any real benefits to this game that can help children in ways other than simple entertainment. Research has shown Tetris can be quite beneficial in a number of different ways. With that in mind, we have compiled a list of reasons children should learn and play Tetris.

1. It Trains Their Motor Skills

Tetris requires and trains an important system of motor skills, including eye-hand coordination, impulse control, and dexterity. Tetris can help adults in this regard as well, but for children, who are still physically developing, it can provide a proportionally significant improvement that can establish long-term benefits

2. It Teaches Them Organizational Skills

Every parent knows the struggle of teaching children how to perform their chores responsibly and effectively. Even if they do clean their room and put their toys away, they seldom do it neatly enough, forcing the parent to clean up after them anyway. Tetris is all about placing objects in the most efficient way possible. It teaches us how individual pieces fit together and how to plan around that to the best of our ability based on the information we have at a given moment. 

Therefore, Tetris can help your children understand object placement better, and if they learn to associate their chores with the game of Tetris, they may stop viewing it as a boring responsibility and engage in it as another fun activity instead.

3. It Teaches Them Strategy

Strategic thinking is a complex set of skills that children can learn and train while playing Tetris. Tetris can teach them to observe, categorize items they have observed, contextualize information and make appropriate associations, and examine how these influence one another at each stage of the game in order to plan their next set of moves while accounting for all the possible variables. 

4. It Trains Their Focus

Tetris can hold children’s focus for hours, especially if uninterrupted. This can help lengthen their attention span, which is another widely useful life skill. If your children have issues focusing on anything long enough, consider having them play Tetris for a certain amount of time. Its highly engaging nature will have them glued to it for hours without them even realizing time is passing. It will soothe their natural restlessness and train their brain to attend to a task without seeking a way out. 

5. It Helps Their Confidence

The more they play, the better they will get at the game, which will provide them with a sense of accomplishment and help them get more confident. Getting better at something and being able to observe your progress is one of the easiest ways for all of us to grow our confidence. Games (like Tetris) that involve observable skill growth are great for children.

6. It Helps With Brain Health

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Tetris has been shown to promote the growth of certain areas of the brain, notably those involved in reasoning, critical thinking, language processing, and multi-dimensional sensory integration. Studies have been performed on adolescents and yielded some pretty impressive results. It’s easily assumed that younger children can reap even more prominent benefits if they engage in the activity early and regularly.

7. It Teaches Them the Value of Persistence

Tetris is a game of simple structure but with quite complex gameplay. There’s a wide range of things the player must keep in mind from the very first second of the game and all throughout. It’s easy to get discouraged by losing, and this is especially true of a child. While you can’t win Tetris, you can get better at it, and as children keep coming back to it, they’ll start seeing better and better results which will encourage them to commit to activities and goals without the fear of failure.

8. It Teaches Them the Harm of Overthinking

To achieve results in Tetris, players need to be able to think fast and be certain in the decision they make. Overthinking can cause doubt which slows their reactions and can lead to even more mistakes. The same is true in life. 

Children should learn to quickly assess the information they have and make decisions based on it as quickly and as confidently as possible. We already established that no one can predict everything, so overthinking won’t actually solve anything. Mistakes are inevitable, so there’s no reason to worry too much about every single move we make. Just do your best at the time and let what happens to happen.

9. It Teaches Them That You Can’t Change the Past

Once something is done, it’s done, and there is no going back. Sometimes we make good decisions we are proud of and look back on them with pride, but sometimes we make mistakes that catch up with us later. We can’t depend on our past success to carry us forever, and we can’t change our past mistakes; we can only deal with the outcome. This is an important life lesson that children should learn as it can help them in various life situations. The optimistic side of this is that real-life actually tends to be more forgiving than Tetris. 

10. It Teaches Them That Life is Unpredictable

In real life, we can never know what the future holds. We all try to predict and plan the forthcoming events as well as our reactions to them, but the truth to the matter is something will always catch us by surprise and completely unprepared to deal with. This is a harsh, but vital lesson for children to learn. The sooner they make peace with the fact that the future is out of their control, the sooner they’ll learn to focus on the present.

11. It Teaches Them the Value of Experience

When they first pick up Tetris, they will probably lose quickly and a lot. Encourage them to keep playing until they see themselves improving. This will help their confidence and teach them that all in life takes practice to get good at. Mistakes are inevitable, but the more they learn, the less of them they’ll make, which will inspire persistence and teach them that giving up is rarely a solution.

12. It Teaches Them Stress-Management

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We have already established that worrying is harmful and benefits no one. As counter-intuitive as this may be, Tetris, which can be quite frustrating itself, can be an excellent tool for teaching children stress management. At first, they may get really upset every time they lose a game, make a mistake, or get a ‘bad’ piece. But as they continue playing, they will build resilience and learn to respond to these things in a calmer matter. 

While playing Tetris, children can learn that most mistakes are manageable, that getting one bad piece is not the end, and that, at the end of the day, they can always try again. Teaching them that bad things aren’t permanent and that there’s always a solution or, at the very least, another opportunity can go a long way towards their development as people.

13. It Can Help With Their Cognitive Skills

Tetris can help children enhance several highly important cognitive skills. It teaches them how to solve problems, how to quickly and efficiently make good decisions, how to manage their physical and emotional impulses, and how to follow a system structure and use it to their advantage.

 In closing

Tetris can be an extremely beneficial activity for children. In addition to promoting and training some essential mental and physical skills, it teaches them some valuable life lessons that can help their development as people and better prepare them for obstacles in life. If you are a parent, encourage your children to spend some time in a day (or every few days) playing this game – there are many benefits they can derive from it!

Aside from all these benefits, Tetris is not without downsides – It can be highly addictive. So if you are a parent, you should encourage your children to engage in this game but manage their time and involvement to prevent it from doing more harm than good.

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This article was co-authored by our team of in-house and freelance writers, and reviewed by our editors, who enjoy sharing their knowledge about their favorite games with others!

JC Franco
Editor | + posts

JC Franco serves as a New York-based editor for Gamesver. His interest for board games centers around chess, a pursuit he began in elementary school at the age of 9. Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Business from Mercyhurst University, JC brings a blend of business acumen and creative insight to his role. Beyond his editorial endeavors, he is a certified USPTA professional, imparting his knowledge in tennis to enthusiasts across the New York City Metropolitan area.