What you do:
A short challenge to get students thinking about how the brain and memory works! You’ll show slides with random objects, and see how many objects the students can remember when the slide is taken away.
What you need:
Activity
Start by showing the students the slide with only 4 objects for 30 seconds as a warm up. Emphasize that they can use any word to remember the objects they want. So for the picture of a couch, the words couch, sofa, chair, seat, or even a drawing of a couch are fine! There’s no right or wrong answer.
I like to re-introduce the scientific method with this activity. Have the students create a hypothesis based on the question: what will happen when the number of images, or the time to memorize, increases? A good hypothesis might be “I predict that I will remember more images when given more time to memorize them”.
As the number of images increases, ask students to converse about their strategies and propose some strategies of your own. Do any students come up with an acronym or a story to help them remember?
At the end of the activity, remind the students that we can improve our memory by training. If fitting for your class, you can also have them calculate percentages, i.e. what percentage of objects did they remember.