Health Quests

Overview
In this activity, students working in small groups visit several Web sites that feature various brainteasers, riddles, word problems, number problems, and picture problems. Groups use their own critical thinking and creative problem-solving abilities to generalize about the nature of the on-line puzzles and, finally, to create a puzzle of their own.

Objectives

• To solve an assortment of puzzles featured on the World Wide Web in order to understand the role of critical and creative thinking in the pursuit of good mental health.
• To use critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills to understand important logic concepts and to create an original puzzle or conundrum.

Getting Started
Bring to class an assortment of puzzle booklets, including crosswords, logic puzzles, and brainteasers. As an alternative, you might write the phrase Puzzles and Games on the chalkboard, explaining to students that this phrase represents the hub of a word web and that they are to brainstorm items that flesh out the web. Ask what the puzzles have in common, eliciting that all make use of powers of thought and problem-solving skills. Remind students that the ability to seek creative solutions and think through problems helps develop good mental health and mental capacity.

Introduce the activity by explaining that students are to work in groups to solve a number of on-line brainteasers. Stress that these activities are not intelligence tests. Encourage groups to work cooperatively and patiently to seek solutions to as many items within a given puzzle as they can. In the interest of time and depending on your class size, you may want to instruct groups to limit themselves to 15 minutes per puzzle.

Classroom Follow-up
Allow time for groups to attempt to solve each other's puzzles, perhaps first asking the class as a whole to develop an assessment form to be completed for each puzzle indicating, for example, the puzzle type (left- or right-brain). If your school or class has its own Web site and there are students in the class with HTML scripting skills, you may want to ask volunteers to produce a puzzle page featuring some or all of the mind puzzles that groups developed for the activity. Other members of the faculty and student body should be alerted to the presence of this new page and encouraged to visit it.