This family-centered Chicago academy encourages kids to train their focus through sensory games while parents turn into trusted teammates – and there’s 0 screen time involved

What happens when a child has to solve a challenge without looking—and a parent has to guide without taking over? At Superminds Academy Chicago, families find out together. Blindfolded sensory games replace screens with hands-on discovery, helping kids train focus, intuition, and perception through playful puzzles. Parents are active teammates, guiding each exercise and celebrating every unexpected breakthrough in real time. Along the way, every shared challenge becomes a chance for parents and children to build trust, communicate differently and feel closer than before.

What is Superminds Academy Chicago?

Created by neuropsychologist Dr. Ann DeSollar and educator Elena Restrepo, Superminds Academy is a 90-minute workshop where children work through a progression of sensory activities without relying on sight. Featured on The Telepathy Tapes, Apple’s top podcast series of 2025, the experience begins with 2D activities involving colors and number cards before progressing to tactile challenges using cups, sorting games, and smaller 3D objects. Children may also tackle fine-motor exercises and recreate drawings using verbal instructions. But the child is only half of the equation.

How do parents get involved at Superminds Academy?

Throughout the session, parents guide the exercises alongside trained facilitators, describing materials, giving instructions, and helping their children make sense of each challenge. There is no handing them over and waiting for the workshop to finish. You’re in it too.

That changes the experience. A card-matching task becomes an exercise in explaining yourself clearly. Sorting an unfamiliar object becomes a small lesson in patience. And when your child can’t simply look down for the answer, the two of you have to listen to each other differently.

It’s also a decidedly off-screen way to spend time together. The stimulation comes from touch, spoken cues, movement, patterns, and the puzzle directly in front of you — not from something flashing across a device. And while concentration is woven through the workshop, perfection isn’t the point. Children move through the exercises at their own pace, with parents there to encourage rather than compete. Some tasks may come quickly; others require another description, another attempt, another moment of trust.

Those quieter exchanges are where Superminds Academy becomes more than a collection of sensory games. For 90 minutes, you’re both fully involved in the same challenge, paying attention to one another without much room for anything else.

Chicago has no shortage of ways to fill a family afternoon. This one asks you to do something slightly different with it: put the screens away, pull the blindfold down, and see what happens when the two of you work it out together.

For families used to afternoons competing with notifications, tablets, and a hundred other distractions, it offers something increasingly rare: time when both of you are focused on exactly the same thing.