Brain Awareness Week is almost here! I spent a big part of the year planning the events for BAW and this year is not the exception, my students and I have been working on some posters for our big event, this week we are working on a talk we will be giving to little kids at the beginning of the tour.
We made an infographic describing the parts of the brain for the poster exhibition and we will also use it in our slides. For this one we used a white background for our colorful brain, and we wrote the parts of the brain over little cartoonish brains that we made transparent with the opacity tool at 50%; it makes it look nice without looking too distracting.
Little kids get bored very fast, so we are trying to be brief and also put some fun games in the presentation to make it more interactive. The themes and colors of Easel.ly make it a great tool for teachers who want to create fun slides. I am using colorful backgrounds for the games, and I’m keeping it simple with a nice big typography and not much more so the kid’s attention will focus on the game.
The one I’m showing here is a game that teaches the kids how your brain can get confused when is trying to do two different things at the same time. The original game we used last year was just some words of different colors over dark paper, so this year I tried to make it nicer for the kids. The game consists on a white rectangle where I wrote the name of the colors using not only different colors, but also different fonts and sizes so it will be extra difficult. The name of the color and the color of the word must always be different, first we will ask the kids to read the word, and after that we will ask them to say just the color of the word. For example: the first word is “red”, but the color of the word is blue, so the kids must see the word “red” and say the color (blue). It is not as easy as it seems to say the color and not the word, because your brain needs a little more time to think. You can ask them to say the colors as fast as they can and give a little prize to the kid who said it faster with fewer mistakes. This game is for kids who already know how to read. You can use this game in your presentation or you can print it and play with the kids in the classroom, it is great for when they are not very focused, because the complexity of the game makes them have to pay attention in order to win.
