Few days back as a part of CSR (Corporate Social responsibility) activity by Cisco India, our team went to a local school for underprivileged children to spend some quality time with them by interacting, learning and playing together.
We thought of interacting with children in usual way of teaching them something or quizzing them with fun questions, so that they win exciting prizes!
But to our surprise, the NGO that was helping us with this initiative had also called up people from Ima recreations. Ima, the creator of Ima recreations, has an expertise in using classic games as a tool to facilitate team building, strategy building and socializing with any age group.
Getting to be a part of some of these traditional games was a breath of fresh air. It is difficult to express in words how much fun it was to re-live those childhood experiences of group and board games.
This reminded of all the games I used to play as a child and how these days my niblings can’t come out of their digital devices. Although, I have been a big fan of digital games and wanted to be a game developer at one point in time(that’s a separate story), but we can’t deny the impact over use of digital devices has on the human mind (specially children).
So, in this new year, I’ll be teaching my nieces one new game every time I visit my hometown and see if that can reduce their screen time.
We played a few games which I had never heard of, like 9 men’s morris, Kalah/Pallan Kuzhi. If you know more such games, please comment below. I am looking for more suggestions of games suitable for 4-12 year olds.
