KenKen isn't for Barbies

"Didn't you see the KenKen puzzles I saved here for you?" Mike asked our daughter as he rounded the kitchen counter after work Tuesday, dropping keys and coffee cup en route.

"Where? Cool!"

While I don't share her love for puzzles, many do. This relatively new successor to Sudoku has caught on fast; when it didn't print one day in a recent issue of The Press, the paper received a flurry of complaints.

Call it math's answer to crosswords: KenKen, like Sudoku, is a number puzzle. You can start anywhere, then problem solve through trial and error to fill in the blanks correctly. Problem-solving puzzles are good brain exercise and recommended by the Alzheimer's Association.

The numeric and logic puzzles are preferred for brain health because they require solving new problems, beyond word retrieval. The more factors, the better the exercise. Unlike Sudoku, KenKen uses addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

In Japanese KenKen means "cleverness squared." The game was created in 2004 not for mere child's play, but as a method of education by schoolteacher Tetsuya Miyamoto, who believes conventional, memory-based education methods fail children. Enhancing logic and problem-solving skills, he told the London Times, is what turns children into smarter, better-prepared and high-achieving adults by "teaching without teaching."

Miyamoto now runs his own school in Japan and teaches KenKen on weekends. In 2008 The Times was the first newspaper to publish the puzzles, which now appear across the United States and around the world.

Like in Sudoku, the object is to fill a grid with numbers (1 through 6), so that no digit appears more than once in any row or column (this is also called a Latin square). KenKen grids are divided into outlined groups of cells (called cages). The numbers in each cage must produce a certain "target" number by a specified math operation (addition, subtraction, multiplication or division). Digits may be repeated within a cage, as long as they are not in the same row or column.

For more about how to play the game see Kenken.com.

Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Email sholehjo@hotmail.com