What induces one's thought process? Can thinking be structured to solve the mishaps of everyday life and help individuals explore their true potential? The answer to these questions defines one’s own existence and adds meaning to life. If we consider a detective agent investigating the clues, medico analyzing the symptoms, programmer sequencing the codes, analyst projecting the probability based on patterns, dentist relating through mirror reflection, architect visualizing and building marvelous structures, and astronaut on a space mission.

The common ground here is that the thought process embarks their experiences in the form of success & failure. Most importantly of all, it castigates the ability to think!

Thinking skills enhances individual’s progress and is one of the core essences of survival. That is, Learning to think - creatively and critically is one of the most important skills that a person needs to develop from an early stage to be prepared for the future. Today’s global world is changing rapidly and children are required to do much more than repeating a list of facts. They need to be wholesome thinkers who can make sense of information, analyze,compare, contrast, and make inferences and tune into Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS).

There is no one strategy to support and teach a child how to think creatively and critically. A parent role is crucial here, as they may sometimes be to ask open-ended questions to guide the thinking process. In other cases, it may be more appropriate to allow the child to experiment and refine theories on what causes things to happen. However, out of all the things, the parents can do is, they can provide opportunities to the children to play with their ideas and explorations.

Play helps to create an informal, engaging environment to test how things work and are crucial in developing thinking skills. It is during the play that children explore the cause and effect on ‘How they think’. It all starts with questions like: How can I arrange the blocks to create a pyramid? How I get the biggest block at the top and still balance the tower? By providing such indoor and outdoor playing experiences, parents can provide opportunities to their children to try something and see the outcome; and then try something else and see if there is a different outcome. These hands-on experiences provide an integral foundation for abstract thinking. Yet, the entire education system primarily focuses on content or information delivery, including the play way methods are used to impart academic content. And, even the age wise ‘learning outcomes’, as defined in various education systems, are based only on academic content.

“But is this the right approach? Shouldn’t learning outcomes be based on age appropriate mental skills or mental behavior development? Isn’t the mental skills development getting lost in the process of academic skills development?” questions Ashutosh Khurana, Co-Founder & CEO of Mind Edutainment (known by the brand name – THOTS Lab).

Paving ways for Experiential Learning
Envisioned to change the perspective of people, the co-founders Ashutosh & Sangeeta created a complete curriculum on Higher Order Thinking skills development through games, without using any academic content. Mind Edutainment (THOTS Lab) is helping schools, parents, trainers and children to adopt ‘Games Based Learning’ to develop various Higher Order Thinking Skills. They have created various proprietary learning systems around board games which aid to develop various mental abilities among children of age 3 to 14 years, through age appropriate challenging situations. Various Critical & Creative thinking skills have been embedded in these physical board games, ensuring children can have the fun with game playing, while parents or trainers can impart thinking skills to them. These games have been designed in such a way that anyone can develop various thinking abilities, irrespective of social or economic or cultural or academic background of the child or parents, all through the play of games.

Mind Edutainment (THOTS Lab) progressive learning curriculum on mental abilities development through games has been helping children in the schools for the last 9 years. Till date, more than 2 lakh children across various parts of the country have been benefitted. Many visionary schools across the country have already integrated it as a mandatory period for each child every week within the school. Now, Mind Edutainment is opening this opportunity directly for the parents so that parents can directly help their child even if their school does not have THOTS Lab.

Why Critical Thinking in the form of Physical Games
It was in 2002 when Dr. Ashutosh Khurana and Dr. Sangeeta Khurana were expecting their first child. Like every other going to be parents, they started visualizing things that they wanted their children to learn as they grow up. They wanted to gift something to their children that could allow them to break out of the pre- established rules of learning and be able to look at things from new dimensions and be practically ready to apply their knowledge as and when the situations demand. After years of exploration, they came across the board games strategy that was followed by many chess players across the globe to develop strategic or tactical thinking in their students.

Ashutosh went through a formal training with a couple of chess players and started developing various games based activities that could help his son develop analytical, structured thinking from an early age. In 2006, when Sangeeta acted like a behavioral scientist to observe and record changes while Ashutosh created different game activities. Sangeeta saw their son responding to the modules created by them and they realized that this learning style could change so many lives. And, that is when they came up with an in-school Thinking Skills development program called as THOTS Lab. Today, their games are being used by various schools as THOTS or a Thinking Class. The students of Primary & Middle years undergo these classes over and above the academic curriculum of the school to develop Higher Order Thinking Skills from an early age.

Ashutosh explains,“How well the children will be able to think depends on the freedom that they are given by their parents and teachers use their thinking abilities for themselves, in an environment. Most often, schools focus excessively on teaching children‘what to think’ rather than ‘how to think.'The focus is to pack content to children within the allotted time without realizing whether their mental ability has been developed to absorb the content or not.”

Further, Sangeeta adds“The curriculum of THOTS Games has been designed in such a way that the game situations make the current thinking ability of the child visible to the child as well as the observer.As the hidden potential or gaps in the thinking

process become obvious to the learner and the trainer, it becomes easy to nurture the potential or remove the gaps.”

MindHour has offices across more than top 30 cities in India with in-house employee strength of around 60 and a Pan India network of more than 65 franchise partners

The founders of Mind Edutainment staunchly believe that learning is most effective when it involves the brain’s natural function of creating meaning from an experience. The organization uses board games in creating those mental experiences for the children which will help them in every situation of life,including academics. These games require a different mental effort and a different thinking at each level and children realize the same after they succeed and fail a few times. They start with using the same thinking skills that worked for them in previous levels only to realize that they would need to think in newer ways to progress through the next level. This process of challenging self-thinking helps them develop newer thinking capabilities in a structured way and develops an ability to learn from their successes as well as mistakes. They learn the most important lesson that they can convert any failure into success if they work on their thinking.

‘THOTS’– Where Thinking Dissects Challenges and Creates Opportunities
Through THOTS, children develop essential 21st-century skills such as critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, and communication. With the THOTS program, Ashutosh and his team directly focus on developing thinking skills and not on the delivery of academic subjects as the schools and parents are already doing so. THOTS acts as a supplement to the schools’ and parents’ efforts in developing the overall performance of the children which is visible within 3 months of working with the children.


THOTS proven pedagogy takes the learner through a simple yet powerful process of reflection and realization through its proprietary THOTS Games. It's' structured experiential process enables delivery of all the four fundamentals mental abilities development - Thinking Skills, Thinking Concepts, Thinking Processes and Thinking Models.

THOTS lays emphasis on the development of thinking skills and thinking processes in a learner-centric, learner-induced environment, thereby focusing on an optimal functioning of a mind. It draws forth the latent capabilities and sensitivities of the mind rather than filling it with pre-defined information. The trainers of THOTS function as ‘facilitators’ of learning by providing an environment where students search for meaning, appreciate uncertainty, inquire responsibly and draw inferences for their higher growth. The program involves hands-on exposure to 10 unique THOTS proprietary games to facilitate learning through age appropriate, subject independent concrete experiences.

The Three-Way Growth Strategy -
Mind Edutainment looks to expand its THOTS Games and learning pedagogy in a three-way process that can bring a revolution of its kind.

Firstly, the organization is offering training to the School and the teacher designated by the school who can dedicatedly deliver THOTS in their school. This will give freedom and flexibility to the school to implement THOTS as the way they deem appropriate for their school children. This will help the school to create an opportunity in making their school a ‘Thinking School’ which is future ready for 21st Century Skills.

Secondly, there are over 1,00,000+ nurturers from Psychology, Human Development, Social Service & allied disciplines pass out every year in India, out of which a very small percentage of candidates get the desired profile i.e. to help another human being in their growth. If these professionals undergo THOTS training program, they can start to deliver the same in their localities or in their nearby schools. This will provide them with higher income opportunities, make them self-reliant and keep the profession of helping others growing further.

Thirdly and most importantly, Ashutosh envisions making parents the trainer of their own child’s growth. According to him, while parents are open to the idea of their children learning anything that adds value to them, they are not spending enough time with their children and engage with them in the learning process. They are getting more inspired by the western world and are moving towards an era where children will interact more with the gadgets, smart devices, and the outside world and their engagement with their own parents will touch the new lows.“As parents, if our children are not able to share their thoughts and emotions with us and are relying on the technology and the outside world for support, we are creating a disconnected society which is really dangerous,” he warns.

He adds, “More and more companies are coming up with engaging content but none of them is actually using the content in bringing a child closer to their parents. This is the void that we are filling and would like to fill in the years to come. And in the process, we can still enjoy the luxury of the western world and still not be as disconnected as the western world is.”

He further adds, “Through THOTS games, we are creating opportunities for those parents who want to be an integral part of their child learning and growth process. The parents will be able to learn through THOTS games those important skills that they always wanted to develop in their child and will also have the satisfaction of developing them in their child while having the fun of playing games.”

Bringing Higher Order Thinking into Mainstream
With increasing information overload, academic content will be of no relevance until the children are imparted with the skills that enable them to apply their knowledge in most productive ways. Mind Edutainment envisions launching a mental wellness app that helps parents assess their child’s mental abilities development periodically and equip them with different interventions and activities to improve the development curve. The organization will continue to churn out more games as they see a trend where parents are moving towards physical tools and smart games to educate their children.

With four patents pending to its name, the founders of Mind Edutainment wish to take their vision further by working with international human development institutions such as UNICEF, UNESCO, UNDP, and others to make a permanent place for direct development of Higher Order Thinking Skills in the mainstream education during the age of 3-12 years through Games Based Learning, which is not dependent on academic content.

Ashutosh Khurana, Co-founder & CEO
Ashutosh an engineering graduate from NIT Kurukshetra and a 1st generation entrepreneur who Co-founded Mind Edutainment Pvt. Ltd. in 2007 to create a unique curriculum -‘THOTS’- on Thinking Skills development. Due to THOTS focus on improving learning capacity & capability by developing thinking skills in each child, irrespective of the academic performance, has led schools from various boards (CBSE / ISCE / IGCSE / State) adopt THOTS as an additional subject, as a part of school curriculum, integrated into the school time table.

He is the brain behind designing of learning progression and games. Under his leadership and guidance, THOTS Lab has received various national and international accolades.

• Rethink India ‘Sri Atal Bihari Vajpayee Innovation Award 2017’ for amalgamating esoteric principles of East with modern researchers of West for developing Higher Order Thinking during formative years of education
• ‘CII Design Excellence Award 2015’ for creating learning experience through THOTS Lab (Environment Design)
• ‘Asia’s Best Innovation in Education Award 2013’ by World Consulting & Research Corporation (WCRC)
• ‘India’s Best Innovation in Education Award 2010’ under ‘Power of Ideas’ organized by the Economic Times, CIIE IIM-Ahmedabad & Department of Science & Technology, Government of India

Mind Edutainment’s Goals
• Attain learner’s Willingness and Engagement through Experiential Learning
• Create Conscious Awareness of Self-Thinking Processes
• Impart new Thinking Skills and Thinking Processes without learner’s conscious effort
• Imbibe a Process of Identifying and Attaining new Thinking Skills
• Enable Interdisciplinary Transference from a Controlled to Uncontrolled Environment

Integrate THOTS – New Possibilities Galore
• Schools: Schools integrating THOTS in their timetable or club activities can make the school Thinking School.
• Parents: Parents integrating THOTS can make a home Thinking Home and create a wonderful environment for a child to channelize their thought processes.
• Trainers: Trainers integrating THOTS can start their own learning centers, can offer services to NGOs, and create an impact in the society.