Way of Cube teaches a child to solve a Rubik's cube, one small step at a time, on a 3D cube they can spin with a finger. Shuffle it, learn a stage, twist it yourself, watch the videos. It is free, and it always will be.
A cube lives in the browser. Press Shuffle and it mixes itself up, checks that the mix can actually be solved, and then walks your child through getting it back. Every step comes with a sentence in plain words, an arrow on the cube showing which slice turns, and a Next button. Nobody has to know any notation to finish a cube here.
The lesson does not go faster than the child does. There is a Back button for the step they missed, an Auto solve for when they just want to watch, and a stage bar across the top that fills in as each part of the cube goes home. If they close the tab halfway, the cube is exactly where they left it when they come back.
It was built by a parent, at the kitchen table, for their own kids, after the fourth evening of trying to teach the middle layer out loud. Everything here is the part that finally worked.
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Way of Cube teaches the beginner layer-by-layer method, the one most people learn first. The cube comes back together in seven stages, bottom layer to top, and each stage only holds on to what the ones before it built. That is the whole trick of it: a cube is not one enormous puzzle, it is seven small ones in a row.
First a white plus sign on the bottom, with each edge matching its side colour. The four white edge pieces come down one at a time, and the trick is to line each one up with its own centre before dropping it. Children usually get most of this stage by themselves once they have seen it twice.
Next, fill the four corners so the whole bottom is white. Each corner gets parked above the gap it belongs in, then tucked down with the same short sequence, over and over. It is the first time a child feels a set of moves become a single thing they know by heart.
Now the middle layer: slide the side edges into their slots, like drawers. Each edge waits on the top face until its slot rolls into place underneath, and then one sequence sends it left or right into the gap. This is where a cube usually stops looking random and starts looking half done.
With two layers home, flip yellow stickers up to make a plus on top. Only the top face matters here, and only one sequence is needed: run it once on a dot, twice on a line, and the plus arrives. What is underneath comes back untouched every time, which is the promise that makes the rest of the solve safe.
The yellow plus is there, but its arms are pointing at the wrong sides, so spin the top edges until each one matches its side colour. Turn the top face until two of them are already right, then swap the other pair with a sequence. Now every side of the cube has a matching stripe of three.
Four corners are left, and they need to move to their right seats. Find the one corner already sitting between the correct two colours, hold it still, and cycle the other three around it. They can come out twisted the wrong way up, and that is fine for now.
The last stage: twist each corner until yellow faces up. The cube looks like it is falling apart while this one runs, and then, on the final turn of the top face, every side snaps into a solid colour at once. It gets a gasp every single time.
The plainest way in. Press Shuffle, read the sentence, press Next, and watch the cube make that turn. The arrow always points at the slice that is about to move, so a child who cannot read every word can still follow along.
Press Scan and hold your real mixed-up cube up to the camera. The app asks for one side at a time, six in all, with a small picture of which colour belongs in the middle and which belongs on top, and each side takes itself once the nine colours hold steady. Then the whole cube appears unfolded flat, so any sticker read wrong can be tapped until it is right, and the lesson that follows is the way out of the cube in your child's hands rather than one the app made up.
On the watch page there is the whole solve played through, plus a short clip for each of the seven stages. Some children want to see the shape of the thing before they try it, and some come back to one clip when a stage will not stick.
Drag any sticker and the cube turns, whether or not it was the move being taught. The lesson simply works out a new route from wherever the cube ended up and carries on. A child cannot break it, cannot get lost, and never has to start over.
The whole cube is keyboard-playable with the U D L R F B keys, and holding Shift turns the other way. Letters can be shown on the stickers for a colourblind cuber, so a piece is named as well as coloured. Read aloud speaks each step out loud for a child who is still learning to read, and sound and animation can be turned off entirely.
Sometimes a cube is impossible to solve, and no amount of turning will ever bring it back. Almost always that is because it came apart at some point, on purpose or on the floor, and was put back together wrong. A corner can go home twisted a third of a turn in its own spot, an edge can go in backwards, and two pieces can end up in each other's places. From the outside it still looks like an ordinary mixed-up cube, which is what makes it so maddening: your child follows every step correctly and the last few pieces simply refuse to land.
Way of Cube looks for exactly that. Scan the cube, and if the colours it reads are not a cube any sequence of turns could reach, it says so kindly and shows you the piece. A twisted corner gets the piece lit up on screen and an arrow for which way to turn it in place. A flipped edge gets a nudge to pop it out and push it back the right way round. A swapped pair gets both pieces named so they can trade back. Then there is a button to press once it is mended, which takes you back through the camera for all six sides, and if the cube is a real cube now the lesson starts from it as though nothing had happened.
There is the full repair guide as well, with how to recognise each of the three faults and how to mend it with your hands, for when the cube is in one room and you are in another.
A shuffled cube takes somewhere between 130 and 220 turns to solve with this method, so a first solve with a grown-up reading along is usually half an hour. Nobody has to do it in one sitting: stages are a natural place to stop, and the cube saves itself, so you can close the tab in the middle of stage 4 and pick it up tomorrow exactly there.
Yes. Press Scan, show the camera each of the six sides, and the cube on screen becomes the cube on your table. You get a flat view of all 54 stickers to fix anything that was read wrong, with each colour's letter written on it if you have letters turned on, and the app checks the pattern is one a real cube can actually be twisted into before it teaches a single move. The camera pictures never leave your device: the reading happens in the browser, and no photo is uploaded or kept.
Probably not for good. A cube that has been taken apart and pushed back together can end up with a corner twisted in its spot, an edge in backwards, or two pieces in each other's places, and no amount of turning will ever solve it again. The scanner spots all three, and instead of refusing your cube it shows you the piece on screen and tells you which way to turn it or how to pop it back the right way round.
Yes. Once the page has loaded a single time it keeps working with no connection at all, which is what makes it useful in a car or on a plane. You can also install it to a home screen from your browser's share or menu, and it opens like an app.
Roughly 6 to 12. Children around 9 and up tend to work through it on their own, while the youngest do best with a grown-up sitting next to them for the first solve, reading the steps and celebrating the stages. After that they mostly want to show you.