Last updated on December 17th, 2025 at 10:02 am
Strong Mind Puzzles – Education Game Review
Strong Mind Puzzles is a Education/Puzzle game from Donalee Markus, first launched in 25th October 2010.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 10+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Strong Mind Puzzles Stand Out
Strong Mind Puzzles update provides progressively difficult variations. This encourages deliberate rehearsal and enhances learning.
The rules, graphics, number of icons, and abstract images become more complex.
Individuals must use the voice in their head to match the goal and complete the game.
The voice in our head (internal dialogue) builds executive skills because it helps:
- reduce impulsivity
- contributes to planning behavior
- encourages introspection and reflection
- provides a system to generate alternatives
This updates include all previous Strong Mind Puzzle Variations. The user is able to control their starting point and progression. The user has the flexibility of moving between games to individualize their learning experience.
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Strong Mind Puzzles is a game designed to challenge your brain. In her 35 years of cognitive restructuring practice, Dr. Markus created a series of paper-and-pencil puzzles to explore new ways to challenge the brain and rehearse cognitive abilities. To reach beyond her clinical practice, these puzzles were converted to a mobile format which provide numerous, varied opportunities for learning.
Effective problem-solving and decision-making is based, at least in part, on the number of variables a problem solver or decision maker is capable of evaluating.
With deliberate rehearsal, individuals can learn to increase the number of variables that they use to make a decision.
— Why Finding Mistakes Develops Critical Thinking Behaviors
Strong Mind Puzzles can help reduce mistakes. Think about what happens when you make a mistake. You become emotionally attached to the mistake. As a result, this emotional investment makes it difficult to examine results objectively. Such reasoning helps explain why we are better at catching other people's mistakes than our own errors.
These puzzles give you practice in identifying and learning to anticipate errors. When you are comparing and contrasting images you search for mistakes. With practice, this develops an error-detection reflex.
This Education game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Strong Mind Puzzles is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 6th May 2022
Recent improvements include:
Bug fix – title for an element
Download & Availability
Strong Mind Puzzles is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Strong Mind Puzzles on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
We just recently bought this app, as it was recommended by the creator to help with our mild TBI. On the advanced and expert levels (the creator advised us to start on the advanced level) with 48 shapes per page, the icons are SOOOO tiny on a majority of the choices. For ten levels and 480 shapes, we find ourselves having to individually open up hundreds of the icons to read the description in order to verify which rules apply. This becomes incredibly and unnecessarily time consuming, as well as exhausting. As we already struggle with intense fatigue, this becomes clearly detrimental rather than beneficial. As recommended by the creator, we bought the biggest iPad we could afford, which they assured us would be an appropriate size. (The next size up would have cost over $1000.) Even worse, if you miss even one icon choice out of the 48, you have to reopen every icon again to reread the description in order to discern which one you may have inadvertently missed. Ive done multitudes of these exercises on paper, as part of our therapy. Those go extremely quickly, as Ive never found this exercise to be difficult. This becomes incredibly frustrating and we hate both how much time it takes and how much effort and energy must be expended in order to complete. We wish Id never bought this app, for this reason.
Thanks for the revamp! This app has definitely helped on our recovery from a mTBI. Some critique of this latest version: 1) what happened to the saved progress? The quick Play Now button helped users start off where they last finished. 2) we cannot utilize the Expert level at all as some of the color differences are so subtle that the color-blind amongst us (yes thats us) deeply struggle to discern the shapes colors. We particularly am red-green color-blind and find the yellow/green, pink/purple, and green/red impossible to sort out despite applying different backgrounds and adjusting lighting. PLEASE put in an option to change shape color schemes.
We like v2.5 of Strong Minds, but find v3.0 to be very awkward (with a variety of bugs and poor design choices); our initial impression is that v3.0 is a late-alpha/early-beta for a promising redesign of a very good tool. We will keep v2.5 on our iPod (and wish we knew how to un-upgrade v3.0 from our iPad). We have emailed the developer with our offer to provide detailed comments; we will update this review no later than mid-June 2018. 25-May Minor update to our prior (17-May) review: v3.01 has a partial fix to bugs involving display of app's Help about images. The developer has not yet responded to our email.
We think it would be helpful to keep track of your progress instead of resetting every time. That way you can see if you are improving. Also, it seems it presents the correct solution too often and for the entire level. Maybe that's on purpose.
We paid for this app and now we can't use it. "Play Now" isn't active so the app won't even begin. When it works we definitely recommend this app.
Waste of time trying to run this app.
Love this new app! Like a personal trainer working your brain.
The challenge is scoring well within the time limit. The higher levels require a very structured thought process.
Actually, we are unable to rate this app because the sound does not work. Is there a bug of some kind that needs to be fixed.
We always played this game on our friends iPod, and we just bought it today. The levels are not incredibly hard like the prior post says, but the game is really challenging if you try to complete each level as fast as you can. At first, each level took us a while to do, maybe 4:00, but now we are able to complete each level in under 2:00. Hope this helps, and we would definitely suggest buying the game. It is fun, and a nice little challenge when you have some downtime.
The nine levels of difficulty are not very challenging. We love the concept and the fact that it says the test is used by scientists and engineers sounded promising, but even on level 9 we barely broke a mental sweat.
Our math tutor told us to get this app because it is suppose to challenge a bunch of our brain that we usually don't challenge and therefore smarter and it is really great he is also a big admirer of the woman who designed it.
It's so nice to have a puzzle app that actually makes us think in more ways than one! While the graphics are simple, the puzzles are complicated. If you want to challenge yourself, we fully recommend it.
We love the colors. We like being able to do this when we're waiting in airports especially. It helps the time go by and we feel we are using a part of our brain that doesn't get challenged. We want to know when the next level will come out.
There are only 9 levels. It us effortless and you will be done the entire app in 15 min. Don't bother with this one.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 4.4
- Size: 127.08 MB
- iOS: 12.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Donalee Markus
Last updated: 6th May 2022 | Genre: Education, Puzzle | Developer: Donalee Markus