Fri 12 May 2006
It's always great to find fun internet-based games that actually challenge you in "real world" skills. (And no, working on your wizard's Ether Flame spell in EverQuest is NOT a real world skill). After all, if you going to waste some time, it might as well be educational, right. Can you tell that my mother is a school teacher? Happy Mothers day!
Anyways, these might be old news to some folks but I've found two fun games that will keep your brain fresh.
First, there is GeoSense. This is a fanstastic interactive game that pits users one-on-one in a timed geography quiz. You're given a city and country and you have 10 seconds to click the map. The player with the best combination of speed and accuracy wins. Given American youth's horrible knowledge of geography, this site could be really helpful. I would recommend it to children of all ages if it weren't for the chatroom being infested with pubescent teen sex fiends. Just go use use myspace or something...
Secondly, for you Python programmers out there, there is the Python Challenge, a surprisingly challenging and mind-boggling course of puzzles that can be solved with Python. Actually some people have solved them with UNIX shell commands, perl or ruby, but many of the hints are python specific. They require a good dose of logic, persistence, knowledge of python libraries and a knack for finding patterns. Basically your goal is, given a minimal set of hints to find and process the data that will lead you to the next URL. I'm on level 9 right now and, well, I'm not going to admit to anyone how long it took to get there. Addictively challenging...
Thats it for now. Have fun.