The Rubik’s Cubing world has been enlarging with intelligent and lightning-quick minded youths for the past decade. In 2008, it was estimated that global sales of Rubik’s Cubes had surpassed 15 million. Jonathan Mintz (12), Jason Niu (11) and Allen Xie (12) started their journey by self-teaching themselves in primary school.
“I got into it because when I was in 3rd grade, the family I have in China bought me a four by four cube, and I couldn’t figure it out so eventually I convinced my mom to get me a three by three,” Xie said. “After an extended period of time, it got really interesting to me and I started watching YouTube videos of people solving Rubik’s Cubes really fast.”
Influenced by their classmates, Niu and Mitz started their journey of speedcubing as well.
“In fourth grade, my friend learned how to solve a Rubik’s Cube and I thought that was very cool, so I learned and I just wanted to get faster and faster when solving it,” Niu said.
Unlike other mental sports, cubing does not require mentoring from another person. Today, there are various different sources on how to start cubing and several tips and tricks.
“I learned how to solve this by looking it up by myself so it’s not really a thing that people usually do mentoring and coaching [for],” Xie said. “Of course having a coach would be useful, but most people tend to study and memorize the algorithms by themselves.”
For students like Niu, who are involved in several other academic clubs and participate in math tournaments, the problem-solving aspect of cubing is what keeps them engaged.
“Personally, I like the problem-solving aspect. It requires you to do some lateral thinking and it gets your brain working,” Niu said.
Advantages to speedcubing include improved pattern recognition, hand-eye coordination, problem solving, and memorization. After some time, each individual cuber tends to master these traits.
“The most useful skill is learning problem solving and thinking quickly on the spot,” Niu said. “I think it’s a different type of problem-solving puzzle, where you don’t know the solution when you first look at it so you have to [try] different methods to get the solution.”
“At the beginning there are many things to learn, such as certain patterns and other optimizations,” Niu said. “A lot of people think it’s difficult, but it’s actually pretty easy. You just have to learn [the different algorithms to solve it].”
All the cubers have a collection of twenty-five or more cubes but what stood out to Mintz, who competes on a much higher level of speed cubing, is Square-1.
“Square-1, which in its solved form kind of looks like a three by three, but when you start mixing it up, it goes into all kinds of crazy shapes,” Mintz said.
Mintz and Xie hope to create a school club for students to gather together and discuss different algorithms, in which they can practice applying them to their solves. However, they both want to participate in such clubs when he enters college next fall.
“I would love to teach other kids because it’s really fun and rewarding,” Mintz said.
While many other kids in his grade were obsessing over video games, Xie’s love for cubes kept on increasing during his childhood.
“I went through a phase of just completely loving cubing,” Xie said. “I brought my Rubik’s Cube with me everywhere: school, shops, restaurants… literally everywhere.”
Anyone is capable of solving cubes especially since there are a lot of videos and pdfs on the internet that are helpful. With the continuance of self practice and timing themselves, they can improve easily.
“It’s a fun hobby, so I think people should try it at least once,” Xie said.
