Introducing SmartyPants!

Over the last decade, we’ve gone from being bachelors who talked about college basketball over cheese dip to fathers who compare notes on ways to convince our sons not to put marmalade in their hair. (Admittedly, this is more of a concern for Mangesh’s family than Will’s.) Like many of you, being new parents means we’re always thinking about our kids—the kind of toys we want them to have, the sort of games we want to play with them.

SmartyPants is our way of taking the spirit of mental_floss and delivering it in kid-friendly form. Our idea was to create a fun-filled roller coaster of facts and challenges built for every age, meant to stretch kids’ minds and foster imagination. But just like mental_floss, the emphasis is always on fun.

SmartyPants is our first collaboration with Melissa & Doug, and we couldn’t be more thrilled about the partnership. Together, we handpicked a brilliant team, leaned on our favorite teachers for their best ideas, then packed the thing full of tongue twisters, logic puzzles, weird facts, creative challenges, word games, and bad jokes (we couldn’t help ourselves!). SmartyPants is exactly the sort of thing our moms would have packed for us on car trips and pulled out on rainy days at the beach house. It’s a project that we’re both really proud of.

We hope that as kids race to master the answers and come up with creative solutions, as they play along with their parents and learn to feed their curiosity, that we’re encouraging a whole new generation of SmartyPants. After all, it’s fun to learn. It’s fun to play. And SmartyPants is about doing both. So what do you say: Can your brain come out and play?

Will and Mangesh

Founders of SmartyPants