Games for the Brain

These brain games are from Phillip Lenssen, via Dean at my company who was thinking about how we could use brain teasers or games to get a learner prepped to learn. The warm up before the real e-Learning begins.

My favorite game is Counterfeit. Get me started and I can't stop.

What if you did something like this, but tried to connect it with the content? Use your brain game as a pre-question to focus the learner on the program's learning objectives. Use a game like this instead of a pre-test. I've posted on pre-testing before, in response to some questions raised by Clark Quinn at Learning Circuits.

Anyone have any experience doing something like that?

Pretesting: Why bother?

Over at The Learning Circuits Blog, Clark Quinn is wondering about pre-tests.

I've always wondered about them myself and have only reluctantly included them in courses. They've always just seemed annoying to me. Well, I recently took Will Thalheimer's Original Learning Research Quiz which had me rethinking the whole point of prequestions/pretesting.

Will points out the validity of pretests and prequestions, arguing that

"prequestions function as learning objectives" guiding the user's "attention toward some aspects of the learning material and away from other
aspects of the learning material."

So if pretests/prequestions are a way to focus your user's attention on the important aspects of the content, then the big question here is, are you asking the right questions? Or are you just asking questions for the sake of asking a question -- because someone told you to include a pre-test?