Challenging Our Minds Weblog

Task 2 - Body Language - This one can be difficult. You must study every little movement of the manikin, including head position, leg and feet movement and how it’s moving its arms and hands to pick up clues about what it is supposed to be feeling. If you do not know all of the emotion words then you should look them up in the dictionary or discuss them with your teacher or parents. Do not just keep guessing until you find out how to match the words to the movements. The object here is to learn about the emotions and how body position and movement show our emotions. If you figure out how to get the correct answers but never learn what the words mean then you really are not learning what the task is all about.

Task 2 - Phoneme Discrimination (Vowels) - This is not timed! Take your time and listen to the words and phonemes as many times as necessary to be sure of your answer. Say the words and the phonemes aloud to help you match them up. Listen very carefully and say them yourself. People usually say that the vowel phonemes are easier than the consonants. Most of the time, when I see someone make an error on this program it is because they were trying to go too fast or they clicked before listening to both of the answer choices. If you are doing all of this and you are still making errors, you should have your teacher or parents watch you do it and show you how to make the sounds yourself.

Task 2 - Pyramids - You will need to experiment with this a little to see what happens when you move the disks in different patterns. Do not just keep moving them until you stumble on the correct order. Watch what happens and think about the pattern. Where does the first move need to be? Does the position of the gold post make any difference? Once you gather all of this information you will be able to deduce the answer.

Task 2 - Line Discrimination - Be sure to look carefully at all of the lines before you start clicking and do not try to go too fast! You should always review all of your choices before you answer no matter what type of learning or test situation you are doing. It is one thing to make an error because you just do not know the answer but if you do know the answer (or could easily figure it out) and you make an error because you did not look at all the choices or you were trying to go too fast then you are not really showing what you are able to do. If you still have trouble with this one, after following this advice, then ask your teacher or parents to watch you do this task to make sure that you are seeing everything properly.

Task 2 - Trail Trace - The key to success here is having a plan and sticking to the plan. At first you know nothing about the Trail. Then you explore, by clicking, until you find a section of the Trail. When you find a section you have to commit it to memory because whenever you make a mistake you have to start over. When you start over you have to retrace what you have already learned before you can explore again. You should have an exploration plan, a pattern by which you test for each new segment. If you do not have a plan and you are just clicking by random guesswork it will be more difficult to remember what you have already tried. This is true for any learning situation you are in. You should always be organized and always have a plan when you are trying to learn new information.

Task 2 - Attributes and Groups - This task uses the objects and conceptual information from Task 1 where you learned that objects have color, shape, size and number attributes. For this task, however, you must use that information to put the objects into groups. All of the objects in a group must have something (i.e. color, shape, size or number of objects) that is the same. The catch is that all of the objects must be arranged in the grid so that they are placed in multiple (more than one) group at the same time. For Level 1, one set of groups will be contained in the rows and a second set of groups will be contained in the columns. For example, all the objects in the rows might be grouped by shape. Row 1 could be squares, Row 2 circles etc.. At the same time the columns could be grouped by color so that all the objects in Column 1 could be red while all the objects in Column 2 could be blue. For each time you do this, carefully study the objects before you start dragging them to the answer grid so you can decide how to arrange them first. For Level 2 and 3, the way you do the task is pretty much the same, there are just more objects, more groups and more concepts (color, shape etc) that you will have to take into account. In addition to Column groups and Row groups, Levels 2 and 3 also have Quadrant (Corner) groups.