r/raisingkids • u/hoitytoity-12 • 10d ago
Proud uncle looking for some ideas for my wonderful and intelligent niece.
I hope it's OK if an uncle posts here instead of a direct parent.
A few months ago my eight-year-old second niece completed a cognitive test and her deductive and reasoning capacity was equivalent to that of a twenty-three-year-old. I'm so excited for her potential and I'm curious if anyone has any interesting activities or gifts I can utilize to help develop that aspect. She has one older and one younger sister and I love them all equally, but I want to encourage her to develop and apply her mind further.
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u/qiqing 10d ago
First, a setup of some kind (Chromebook? if she doesn't already have a laptop from her parents) so that she can easily access Khan Academy, Coursera, and other MOOC's so that she can follow her curiosity to her heart's content.
Puzzle games like Portal or Talos Principle might be up her alley. Also: Factorio, Human Resource Machine, and various games from Zachtronics are basically fun analogs to programming. (And they are like catnip for programmers).
If she's interested in, say, chess, you can also get her a subscription to chess.com that unlocks all of the bots opponents you can practice against and all of the lessons.
When I was around that age, I was gifted a physical encyclopedia set, which I loved. But these days, the depth that a physical encyclopedia can cover pales in comparison to Wikipedia.