This is a terrific software series to build core cognitive and thinking skills and have lots of fun at the same time.  My children have played the Thinkin' Things series games for over 5 years and they still enjoy them. 

Thinkin' Things 1

This is the first in a family of Riverdeep products designed to offer children, ages 4-8, a head start with a variety of thinking skills: memory, auditory processing, critical thinking, problem solving and creativity. 

It focuses on 'how children learn'. Is your child more likely to remember what is seen, or what is heard? How does your child approach discovery learning? Does your child 'guess and test? Once something is 'discovered' does your child use that information in another way to 'see what happens?' Does your child prefer to take Fripple orders at the door (both auditory and visual), on the phone (auditory only), or by fax (visual only)? Thinkin' Things allows children to learn through their preferred modalities and strengths while encouraging growth and building skills in other areas as well.

The main menu of Thinkin' Things lets you choose from six learning activities.

Orange Banga - Develop creativity, auditory discrimination, and memory as you improvise or repeat patterns.  Strengthens auditory memory in a non-verbal workout with percussion instruments - great fun!

Fripple Shop - Observe and compare attributes as you use 'and', 'or' and 'not'. Help each customer find just the right Fripple.  Greatly helps improve auditory processing of children. 

Feathered Friends - Develop critical thinking ability as you deduce rule and then build a Feathered Friend to test your hypothesis.  Involves matching and pattern recognition.

BLOX-Flying Spheres - Blend music, art, science, and play as you experiment with motion and the illusion of depth. Create unique visual effects to interpret different kinds of music.

Toony Loon - Increase memory and musical skills as you repeat patterns or create tunes of your own on Toony's wacky xylophone.  This is a great non-verbal auditory processing work-out.

BOX-Flying Shapes - Discover spatial relationships. Create your own works of kinetic art as you control the motion of shapes and the sounds they make.  Personally I find this option not overly useful for autistic children - it can be used more as an incentive.

Activities allow students to build skills at their own pace. Reading is not required, so both readers and non-readers can succeed.

Thinkin' Things 2

Once your child has mastered Thinnkin' Things 1 he or she is ready to move on to Thinkin' Things 2, which provides similar activities, at but at a bit more challenging level.  The second in the  Thinkin' Things series focuses attention on how children learn. How does your child approach the new tools found in 2-3D BLOX and Snake BLOX? After discovering the function of one tool, does your child combine that tool with another to 'see what happens?' Is your child more likely to remember what is seen or what is heard? In playing Frippletration, is your child more successful with visual problems or with auditory problems? (You can use the 'see' and 'hear' Grow Slides to monitor progress).

Thinkin' Things 2 lets you choose from five learning activities:

Oranga Banga's Band - Develop rhythmic creativity and awareness of rhythmic notation as you create one-, two- or three-part patterns and are challenged to match what you see to what you hear.

2-3D BLOX - Create and map two-dimensional pictures onto three-dimensional shapes. Build visual awareness as you experiment with positive and negative space.

Snake BLOX - Use a 'making' tool to separate pictures into foreground and background layers. Make paths over and under the layers with a 'snake' of trailing shapes as you explore illusions and create dynamic visual effects.

Flippletration - Play the traditional concentration game with a new twist. Choose between 'See' or 'Hear' problems to develop visual or auditory memory.

Activities allow students to build skills at their own pace. Reading is not required, so both readers and non-readers can succeed.

Thinkin' Things 2 includes built-in scanning for single switch users in some of the activities (Orange Banga's Band, Frippletration and Toony's Tunes).

Thinkin' Things 3

Ages 7-13.  As kids hit the double-digit ages, it gets harder and harder to find good software. Only a handful of titles pass muster with both parents and their increasingly independent-minded offspring. Thinkin' Things Collection 3 is one of those rarities.

In Thinkin' Things newest product, kids ages 7-13 encounter five thought-provoking activities and puzzles, which they tackle through a process of trial and error, developing and testing hypotheses and discovering for themselves what works - or doesn't work . They can try their hand as detectives, commodity brokers and directors of a wild half-time football show, explore special visual effects and conduct "virtual" physics experiments.

As with many of the best products for this age range, Thinkin' Things Collection 3 has no explicit instructions or rules. Kids have to figure out WHAT they're supposed to be doing. Next they have to figure out HOW to do it. Then, there's the additional pleasure of figuring out how to do it better (and how to stump parents, siblings or friends). As kids master one level of challenge, they can move the "Grow Slide" to a more advanced level.