One of the more popular gaming fads over the last couple of years have been the various “brain training” games, that provide a handheld game console vehicle for a variety of mental arithmetic, logical and verbal reasoning tests, and timed perception/response activities (such as the Stroop task (try it here), which typically tests how quickly you can disambiguate colours from colour words (here’s an explanation of the effect on open2)).
So I was quite intrigued to see a perceptual reasoning ‘game’ today (on a woodworking website of all places!) which presents you with “a series of geometries that need to be adjusted a little bit to make them right. A square highlights the point that needs to be moved or adjusted. Use the mouse to drag the blue square or arrowhead where you feel it is ‘right’. Once you let go of the mouse, the computer evaluates your move, so don’t let up on the mouse button until you are sure.”
The context of the game is described as follows: “If you are somebody who is into woodworking or construction, its good to be one of the people who notice when things are crooked. But I suspect the ability to notice that things might be just a little off square, off centre, or not quite straight, varies greatly. I thought it would be fun for people to try to test their abilities to see if things are straight or crooked in a little game.”
So for example, in the following example, you have to move the corner to create a parallelogram:
You can find the game here: The Eyeballing Game (instructions).
If you give it a go, post how well you did back here ;-)
If that’s too, err, quirky(?) for you, how about a round of golf – in a browser? World Golf Tour.
See you in the clubhouse… ;-)
