Our Favorite Mind-Bending TED-Ed Riddles for Kids
I absolutely love riddles. And I enjoy all kinds of riddles - whether they’re built on wordplay and fall closer into the joke category, or whether they have a true logical answer and more closely resemble a math problem. It’s all fun to me. So I started sharing a lot of riddles with my son when he was very young, and we memorized our favorites.
Of course at first our favorite riddles were all wordplay riddles or think-outside-the-box riddles with simple answers - because he was too young (about 5 at the time) for the more complicated variety. One of my personal favorites is “what can you put in a barrel that actually makes it lighter?” - a hole. And if those are the kinds of riddles you want, we've already gathered together our very favorites for you.
I’ll always look back fondly at that list of our favorite riddles. Sometimes I still ask my son some of them out of the blue just for fun - and he usually answers before I finish. But now that he’s older (8 years old now) he can sit down with some true brain-teasers like the ones created by TED-Ed.
TED-Ed is the youth and education initiative of TED - the organization almost everyone is familiar with for their fascinating TED Talks lectures. TED-Ed focuses on lessons worth sharing, and I absolutely adore the math and logic riddles they craft for kids. They were absolutely always one of my favorite fun activities to slip into a 4th grade math class.
The riddles are animated and very engaging, and they do a great job of alluding to popular cultural references like Pokemon or Harry Potter to capture the interest of kids. But they are also a little hit and miss, depending on what you’re looking for of course. What I mean by that is they can be either heavy on the logic, or heavy on the math.
The videos I don’t enjoy as much are the ones that are literally complicated animated math problems - with a prerequisite that you knew some sort of fancy algorithm. Those aren’t fun for kids at all, unless of course you use them to pair with a targeted lesson or review on that particular math topic you’ve already covered.
Personally I vastly prefer riddles that can actually be solved by logic, even by younger kids, with basically no previous math knowledge of any kind. Just give the kiddos a piece of paper and a pencil and plenty of time and they can actually think their way through the solution. They feel more like riddles to me that way, and of course they make for better general recommendations as well, because anyone can try to solve them.
So today I wanted to share our very favorites. I handpicked the TED-Ed riddles that I always thought were the best-crafted, and perfect for any kids out there. You have to think outside the box, you have to calculate, and you have to be patient - but they are actually solvable through logic. Both my son and my former math students adore them. And I assure you they are no easy task for adults either!
The videos in this article are owned by TED-Ed, and created by authors Alex Gendler and Lisa Winer. Make sure to visit their YouTube channel for more videos, and, to support their work for students, you can visit their Patreon.
The Bridge Riddle by Alex Gendler
The Bridge Riddle will always be my favorite. It’s very entertaining with a fun little spooky story about zombies, and it’s a legitimately interesting challenge. It’s not easy by any means, but it’s also completely solvable. It’s the definition of a good brain teaser. Kids absolutely love to try and solve it. And when my son was 5, he memorized the entire answer and loved to recite it back to you. (Plus he loved being a little spooked by the zombies!)
The Hat Riddle by Alex Gendler
This one has a terrific funny alien story to frame the riddle that kids love. It’s also very quick to set up and understand, but devilishly tricky to solve - the best kind of riddles! It makes for a very good math lesson, and the solution is so incredibly satisfying. Truly brilliant.
The River Crossing Riddle by Lisa Winer
This one might sound familiar, because it’s a lot like the famous puzzle of the man trying to get a fox, a chicken, and a sack of corn across the river. This one has lions and wildebeests, and you have to try and get them all across safely without the lions ever outnumbering the wildebeests.
The Pirate Riddle by Alex Gendler
I really love this riddle. I love it when the characters in a story are said to be masters of logic, so every single decision and assumption they make will involve perfect logic and maximize their potential for success. I was instantly intrigued the first time I heard this riddle about a pirate captain trying to figure out a way to split the treasure with his crew without being forced to walk the plank. The logic is pure and it’s a blast.
The Virus Riddle by Lisa Winer
Probably the most think-outside-the-box, follow-the-rules-closely kind of riddle on the list, but kids like that kind of thing, and it’s good to throw one of those in every once in a while. This is a riddle that kids will probably draw solutions over and over again and throw their hands in the air. But the answer is satisfying and it finishes with an interesting mathematical concept and history lesson too.
If you want to support the cool work that TED-Ed does for students and teachers across the world, you can help out through their Patreon, or even get involved.
If you like jokes and riddles, make sure to check out the following articles too:
The Best Riddles for Kids
The Best Jokes for Kids
The Best Dad Jokes
Do your kids or students like riddles as much as mine do? Have you ever tried any TED-Ed riddles before? Which one is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!
