Web Exercises

1. National Geographic’s Brain Games Exercises

The following links have several excellent resources related to logic and heuristics, including articles, brief videos, and exercises. The exercises are fun, and each takes less than a minute to complete. What’s even better is that once you complete an exercise, you are given feedback about your performance and what it says about your ability to solve problems based on logic and use of heuristics.

http://braingames.nationalgeographic.com/#/episodes/logic

http://braingames.nationalgeographic.com/#/episodes/misconceptions

2. National Geographic’s Brain Games Episode: Logic

This webpage provides five brief video clips from the full episode on Logic. You may ask students to select a clip to view and discuss in a discussion forum or provide the link as an additional resource to accompany this chapter’s materials.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/brain-games/episodes/logic/

3. Fake News! How to Evaluate Sources

We are constantly bombarded with information and students must learn what makes a source trustworthy. The following link provides several questions to ask when evaluating sources:

https://www.globalcognition.org/evaluating-sources/

For this web exercise, have students enter the phrase “best ways to prevent sun damage” in a web browser. Ask them to select three results from their search and to apply the questions from the link above to each web source. Then, have students discuss the merits of each source. You can use any phrase, but I like this one because it brings up a variety of resources (using Google, it led me to a USCF dermatology page, a popular magazine webpage, some professional society websites, and some obvious non-scholarly sources) that lends well to this exercise.