Tracking and studying searches on your site is a valuable part of site analytics, but many site owners underestimate the benefit of it. Website search analytics can provide advantageous insights into what people are looking for on your site and also what your site looks like in search engine results.

In this guide, we'll go over the fundamentals of search analytics, using Google Analytics as our tool.

Types of Searches

We'll look at the two broad categories of search: external search and internal search, both of which offer different information to you as a site owner.

External search relates to the keywords people use to arrive at your site through search engines such as Google.

Internal search is tracking what users input into the search feature on your site. For example, WordPress and Drupal have built-in website search capabilities that you can log through Google Analytics. Internal search capabilities in Google Analytics require some additional set up (which we'll cover later down in this guide).

External Search Reports in Google Analytics

External search results that bring visitors to your site are viewable in any Google Analytics account by default without further set up. Studying external search reports give you a good idea of how people get to your site. In other words, if you're getting lots of visits for certain phrases then chances are you are ranking highly for that phrase.

To look at your external search keywords is rather straightforward and is shown in a "Keywords" box on the standard Google Analytics dashboard. This box shows the top five search terms that drive traffic to your site through search engines. You can then click "view report" (this might also say "view full report," which is the same thing) at the bottom of the box to look at a more thorough overview of the results.

If you don't see the "Keywords" box, you can still get to your Keywords report by using the navigation menu on the left, Traffic Sources > Keywords.

As with many Google Analytics report pages, you will have the time/visits graph showing you the amount of traffic generated by search engine keywords over the past month.

Underneath the graph, you will have your table of keywords where you can start to extract some more meaningful information. By default, this table shows 10 rows.

What Should You Be Looking For?

To start with, it would be interesting to see what your popular keywords are. It would be helpful to analyze what search phrases are bringing people to your site. Are the keywords you are seeing to be expected? Do you need other keywords to be ranking well in your site?

For example, if your site were about Sudoku puzzles, you would expect to see words and phrases such as "sudoku," "sudoku puzzles" and so forth to comprise most of the top search key phrases.

However, you might also discover other key phrases that people use that you didn't expect such as "brain games" and "mental agility exercises" that you can consider when you create more content for your Sudoku site to improve the ranking of these keywords.

This report is a good barometer for seeing how your site looks like to search engines. If you have some unexpected phrases in your top results, then you might want to ask yourself why they are there. Does it have a positive effect on your site in that you're drawing in the audience you are targeting? Or are they arriving there by accident because of an ambiguous key phrase and thus you aren't effectively getting the right type of people viewing your site?

Using the Filter Keywords Feature to Find Trends

You want to pay attention to trends, so it's worth filtering out some results before you start digging any further. For example, you'll have plenty of results that have only been used once; you want to filter these out because just one use of a search term doesn't really show a trend.

To filter out non-trending search terms, pick a minimum number of page visits. This is going to be relative to the amount of traffic you get on your site and how long your website has been up (newer sites might not yet be highly visible in search engine results, and thus, would have limited information). I'd normally say about 10 visits is a good minimum.

Once you have figured out the minimum number of page visits, it's time to filter.

At the bottom left of the Keywords report page, there is "Filter Keyword" option, and beside it, an "Advanced Filter" link. Click the "Advanced Filter" link this will expand a new set of options for more refined reports.

Click on the "Add new condition" dropdown, and then choose the Visits option under Site Usage.

After adding the new condition, you will see a conditional statement dropdown menu, which will have options such as "Less than," "Less than or equal to," "Greater than", and so forth. In this menu, choose "Greater than" and then enter "10" in the input field beside it our filter should now read, "Visits Greater than 10." Finally, click on the "Apply Filter" button to filter your results.

You can browse around these results, comparing the number of visits from different phrases to get a good idea of what your site is doing best.

For example, are people who arrive through the keyword "apple" spending more time browsing than people who arrive via "banana"? It's likely that your site is proving to be more interesting towards people who like apples, and so you could make educated design changes using this information, such as making it more attractive to banana lovers to get them to spend more time on your site or just focusing on apple lovers to get more of them to come.

Analyzing Bounce Rate

Another good figure to look at is the bounce rate for search terms. A quick click on the Bounce Rate column heading will sort the table by bounce rate.

A high bounce rate will show that your site isn't really appealing to people looking for a particular search term. If it's supposed to be appealing, then it's time to figure out why.

Let's say you have a high bounce rate for the phrase "chicken farming" yet it's something you think people would want to read about on your site.

In the first column (under "Keyword"), click on the keyword that has a high bounce rate ("chicken farming" in this instance); this will take you to a new screen where you will get more detailed data about that particular search term.

Staying on the Site Usage tab and clicking on the box that says "None" will give you options for a variety of metrics that you can dig into for discovering trends, such as "Language," "Continent," "Browser" and so forth.

For this particular task of realizing why a particular term has a high bounce rate, a good metric to look at is "Landing Page" to see which web pages visitors are actually leaving from.

A Note about New Visits Stats

One thing you may notice when you're digging into external search reports is that many Keyword metrics will show mostly new visits. This stands to reason, as many returning visitors will often come straight to your site without using a search engine (e.g., they have bookmarked your site or have remembered your website address).

Internal Search Reports in Google Analytics

Next, let us discuss internal search reports; search phrases that are used on your site's native search feature. Internal search tracking will give you great insight into what users are expecting to find on your site and the effectiveness of your information architecture.

Once internal search is set up, you should be able to view what people have been typing into your search boxes.

What Internal Search Reports Are Telling You

The data you obtain from internal search analytics is essentially a resource that tells you what your visitors cannot find on your site.

For example, if you sell clothing and you have hundreds of searches for "pink ball gowns" but you don't sell them, it might just be worth looking into selling pink ball gowns.

If you receive a lot of searches for pink ball gowns, but you have a link to your pink ball gowns category right on your navigation bar, then there's a good chance there's something wrong with your site navigation's design and effectiveness.

Setting Up Internal Search Analytics

To set up site search reporting, navigate to Content > Site Search in Google Analytics' left menu. When you go to this menu item, you'll receive some instructions for setting up your site search.

As a quick example, we'll look at setting up site search for a WordPress site.

Firstly, you need to figure out what URL variable is being used for the search feature on your site. Google Analytics refers to this as "Query Parameter." The easiest way to figure out your Query Parameter is by typing in a search keyword into your site search and then looking at the resulting URL afterwards.

In WordPress, doing a search using the built-in search feature should send you to a page such as http://www.yoursite.com/?s=search+term, which shows that the search term is passed in the URL as a URL variable called s.

In Drupal, the search result page's URL looks like:

http:// www.yoursite.com/index.php?q=search/node/search+term

This means that the URL variable is q.

Once you've figured this out, click on "Edit" under the Website Profiles summary table that you can find by navigating to the first screen of Google Analytics when you first log in, or by clicking on "Analytics Settings" right below the Google Analytics logo.

This will take you to the Profile Settings page for your site. Click "Edit" beside the Main Website Profile Information box heading. This will take you to the Edit Profile Information page.

In the Edit Profile Information page, scroll down to the Site Search section and choose the "Do Track Site Search" option; choosing this will reveal more options.

The only box you need to fill in is the "Query Parameter" option, which in the case of WordPress' built-in search, we figured out to be the URL variable of "s". Enter that value and click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

Hey Presto! your site search is now set up. You just have to leave it alone for a little while so that it gets a chance to gather some results.

Viewing Internal Site Search Reports

To look at your Site Search reports, go to Content > Site Search. The first thing you'll notice is that there are a few new sections you might not be familiar with if you haven't set up Site Search before.

Don't feel too daunted though, as everything you need can be accessed quite easily from the Content > Site Search > Overview page. Additionally, Google has also handily put a few helpful links on this page to answer some questions you may have.

By clicking on the various sections on the Overview page, you can quickly see some useful information about your internal site search. Let's examine some of these report pages.

Search Terms Report

One of the easiest places to start getting information from is the Search Terms page.

Simply ordering/sorting the data using the various columns will start to give you a feel for what people are doing in terms of internal site search.

The default is ordered by total unique searches and whatever phrases are at the top will clue you in on a couple of things.

The first thing is this: If a phrase is on something that is already on your website, then this is indicating that people can't find (or can't be bothered to try to find) it through your normal site navigation.

The second thing to look for is phrases that relate to things that aren't on your site. In this case, a large volume of searches will show what people are expecting to find from your site. If these things are something you think you should be offering, then why aren't you?

However, if popular site search phrases are unrelated to the nature of your site, then maybe people haven't understood what your site is actually about. This could imply many things that you could be doing to improve the content, structure, and design of your site, such as including a site summary or tagline in a visible location on all your web pages or improving your About page to clearly state your site's objectives.

Some site search features have default values that act as placeholders (such as "Enter search term" or "Search"); these search terms might therefore show trends in your Search Terms report.

This isn't uncommon and is caused by people accidentally clicking your site search feature before entering their search term. If it happens too much though, there might be something wrong with the design or functionality of your site search feature. It could be, for instance, a web-browser-specific bug, and in that instance, it would be helpful to see if you can hunt down a pattern in the occurrences of these search terms for a certain web browser.

Usage Report

Another page under Site Search to go and see is Usage.

Usage shows you a simple comparison of page visits where people use site search versus visits where people don't use site search.

This is really a very subjective measure because it all depends on the nature of your website. Amazon, for example, probably has a large number of visits where search is used, but that doesn't mean much in terms of the failure of their information structure because they want people to use site search to find highly specific things, using the site search feature as a prominent element of their site design.

In short, these figures can be good or bad depending on your intent.

Start Pages

The next page after Usage is the Start Pages. This report displays where visitors tend to use site search from. This report can identify navigational dead-ends in your site pages where people get confused as to what to do next.

Don't be too concerned if your home/front page ranks highly in this report. Often people will visit your site knowing what they want, so they'll tap it straight into the search box from your main page.

However, if a particular landing page seems odd, such as an e-commerce checkout page where you want people to effortlessly buy your products, then you might need to look at the efficacy of your procedure for buying products on your site.

Goals

The last thing I want to talk about is the Goals report. Before, I talked about setting up Goals and Funnels in Google Analytics (read that guide if you're unfamiliar with the term). This report is useful for seeing the effectiveness of turning your search results into conversions. After clicking on the Goals tab, a quick summary at the top of the page will report some basic figures. If you aren't turning many of your searches into conversions, it could well be worth looking at the quality of your results in delivering the desired information to users in order to keep them interested.

Analyze and Explore Your Search Terms

It's essential to note that we have barely scratched the surface of search analytics. This guide was meant to highlight the fundamentals and set you on your path to exploring the subject further. If you have any questions or additional tips, please do share in the comments let's talk about search analysis!

Related Content

• Google Analytics in Depth: Goals and Funnels
• Unleashing the Power of Website Analytics
• 10 Promising Free Web Analytics Tools
• Related categories: Tools and Resources

About the Author

Dave Sparks is a web designer and developer working for Armitage Online in the Lake District. He can be found writing about various web topics on his blog at Kamikazemusic.com, twittering as twitter.com/dsparks83 and working on his website analytics project Stat Share.

In the July 12 & 19 issue of The New Yorker, there's a nice little piece by Ben McGrath called Spy vs. Spy: Say What? that starts out, Count linguists and phonologists among those bewildered by last week's Russian spying scandal, in which the F.B.I. arrested a network of presumed Muscovite spooks who appeared to be living ordinary American lives, gardening and Facebooking and selling real estate under assumed identities. (Never mind the problematic presupposition signaled by the conjunction linguists and phonologists'.) Only an abstract of the article is in the accessible online issue, here. For the full article you need hard copy or a subscription to the digital online version.

The linguistic issue is that one of the spies explained her accent by saying she was Belgian, and another by declaring herself to be Qubcois. Maria Gouskova, a UMass Ph.D. now an assistant professor at NYU and a specialist in Russian phonology, gets extensively quoted and does the profession proud, including showing that linguists and phonologists can have a sense of humor; and Ben McGrath seems to have done a fine job of writing it up, also with good quotes from Stephanie Harves and Joshua Fishman.

Gouskova and Harves briefly describe some differences between a Russian accent and French Canadian, Flemish and Walloon accents, and were surprised at the choices of cover' identities. Fishman suggested that the choices worked all right because (a) French-related accents are often perceived in the West as high-status and acceptable, Slavic ones as more suspicious, and (b) Americans don't actually know how to place accents. Being a spy, all you have to do is count on American ignorance, Fishman said. Many Americans don't even know what the native languages of Belgians are, let alone be able to recognize accents of Belgians speaking English. So if you have an unrecognized accent, and you declare yourself Belgian, you may well get away with it among most Americans, and you'll be regarded with less suspicion than if you declare yourself Russian or anything else Slavic.

I like the last paragraph and will quote it in full.

Gouskova, who was born in Moscow but has lived in the United States for almost seventeen years, said she is sometimes confused for a native Dutch speaker. Once, I convinced somebody I was from Antarctica and got away with it for two weeks, she said. This was in the Midwest, and she was pretty nave. I was an undergraduate, and my accent was a little stronger than it is now. I told her my parents were scientists, and my dad had this big beard because it was so cold. But then I started feeling sorry for her. I said, I'm not really from Antarctica. Nobody lives there permanently. I'm from Russia.' She took it well.

Adventure games were all the rave back in the late 80's and 90's but have since fallen out of the spotlight as first person shooters, sports titles and role-playing games seem to rank the highest on sales charts.

Regardless, there are still many great adventure games being made today by talented video game developers.

In no particular order, here's a list of ten great free adventure games you shouldn't miss!

Dirty Split

Created by Dreamagination Entertainment, Dirty Split is a very high quality adventure that rivals many commercial games. You play a private investigator named Alan Baxter who is looking to solve the case of a plastic surgeon's murder. Visuals are stunning and crisp, and the voice acting is spot on. Albeit it a little short, playing this is a great way to spend an afternoon.

Sam & Max Episode 4:Abe Lincoln Must Die!

If you haven't heard of Sam & Max, then you're not an adventure gamer. It's okay don't beat yourself up too much. Just go ahead and download the free fourth episode of Sam & Max: Season One.

Sam & Max are known to have a great sense of humor, so if you like to laugh (and who doesn't), you must play this game. This is also a good choice for new adventurers, because unlike some other games, the puzzles in this one aren't too bad. The dialogue is hilarious and after playing the free episode, you may be tempted to buy the whole season. Hey don't blame me!

Beneath a Steel Sky

A cult classic, this was a commercial game long ago, but is now available for free by using the ScummmVM engine. In the game your whole town is destroyed and you are captured. Fortunately, the helicopter you're on crashes and you're the only survivor.

Considering its age, the graphics are nice and the gameplay is simple. At the time the game had a somewhat revolutionary system that allowed non-playable characters to go about their business in the game and interact with the environment. We've sure come a long way.

To play, download the game from the ScummVM Extra's section.

Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy

Game developer Alasdair Beckett made this game for his girlfriend, but we all get to enjoy it too. Wonderful graphics are one thing you'll notice in many of the games on this list and Nelly Cootalot is a good example. Nelly's unique graphics are made by using an interesting hand-drawn and cutout style. Besides the art style, the gameplay is also in the classic style of LucasArts games and is very easy to get into.

A Tale Of Two Kingdoms

Created just a few years ago in 2007, A Tale of Two Kingdoms by Crystal Shard is a great adventure you don't want to miss out on.

Graphics and gameplay are similar to the Sierra and LucasArt games of yesteryear. The world is quite large, but it doesn't feel deserted as there are many characters in the game. One unique feature are the five different endings. I recommend you save your game frequently, as it is easy to make a mistake and you'll be wishing you could go back in time.

Flight Of The Amazon Queen

Another classic game with an Indian Jones 1940's type of feel. If you like games with a silly storyline and a fun plot, be sure to check this one out. You play Joe King, a pilot with a wise mouth. Your mission is to rescue Faye Russell, a beautiful (of course) movie actress. Some others may need your saving as well but I'll let you discover that on your own.

Some of the puzzles are a bit confusing but stick with it and you can get through it. Some aspects of the game aren't perfect, like the interface, but overall the price is right and it's a fun adventure.

Another one courtesy of ScummVM, you can download it here.

Emily Enough: Imprisoned

I'm including this game on the list for two reasons. One, it is a good game, so why not mention it? And two, it's demented, just like many of us.

In Emily Enough: Imprisoned, developed by Logan Worsley, you play a psychopathic little girl who has murdered her family. Why? Well, that's what happens when you don't buy her what she wants for her birthday. The graphics for this game are a bit drab, but it's intentional as it helps set the mood.

To get through this game, some of the puzzles will require you to think as a psychopath, so keep that in mind. I recommend this game, but only for those who aren't easily offended and enjoy some dark comedy!

Kingdom Of Loathing

So far, all the games on the list have been downloadable. But for those who are looking for a funny web-based adventure, look no further than Kingdom of Loathing. Since it's online, you also have the ability to play with other real players. Originally released in 2003, the game has continually been updated with more and more content. Although it lacks a focus on graphics (you should expect a lot of stick figures), the game makes up for it with wit and humor.

You can choose from six classes when creating your character, each specializing in certain fields. Would you like to be a Disco Bandit, or perhaps a Seal Clubber? Whatever floats your boat. Be sure to check this one out.

For more information about getting started, be sure to read Karl's guide.

Life Of D. Duck

I promise you have never played a game quite like this. For starters, let's talk about the graphics. Do you have children? Have you ever seen the drawings from a child on a refrigerator? Those drawings basically sum up what you can expect to see in Life of D. Duck.

The shining element of this game is its dialogue. You won't be overly impressed by the graphics or the puzzles (which are neither too easy or too hard), but the story keeps it going. To me, it's charming and simply funny.

Besides playing the game, be sure to check out the additional content on the author's web site for additional story-lines. Some of them are very compelling, such as when D. Duck gets stung by a bee. Wow.

Conclusion

There are many great adventure games out there and it was difficult narrowing them down to nine. What would you have liked to see on the list? Do you have any suggestions for can't-miss games? Please comment and let us know!

Do you like MakeUseOf articles? Do share our articles with others! It's really important to us.

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Consider, if you would, a theoretical lonely hearts ad. Peripatetic puzzle fanatic seeks similar. Must be rolling in Benjamins, like primary colors, travel, the eternal quest for knowledge, and free food, including the stuff in trays found on airplanes. Is this perhaps the secret message that ITA, the company that creates the software underlying almost every online travel transaction, sent out as it looked for a buyer for its $1 billion business?

There are myriad reasons why Google and ITA would be a tight fit in the travel world, but forget about flights. When it comes to hiring talent, both Google and ITA seem to have the same thing on their minds: the ability of their future employees to solve puzzles that would cause the brains of most people bestowed with a higher-than-average IQ to start emitting smoke and a funny smell.

Here's one example of the kind of riddle that Google asks job-seekers to solve, taken from the blog of one candidate some years back.

Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?*

One of my colleagues came up with the idea of a lesbian commune--neat, but wrong. Google presents all kinds of arcane problems to potential employees of just about every sector it hires in, and expects its workers to be able to provide clever, original and bang-on-the-nose solutions to the questions. Potential software engineers are directed to the Topcoder website, where there are a bunch of competitions for the uber-gray mattered programmers to get their synapses round.

And it turns out that ITA is no different. As well as the "Current Hiring Puzzles" on the company's website which, if I didn't have a day job, I'd be more than happy to spend the afternoon doing, there's one about strawberries. Yum, I thought. Summer's here, it's almost lunchtime in the UK, why not? And then I noticed the words "computer," and "scientist," followed by the phrase, "write a program."

Any dense cloud you see hovering over West London this afternoon probably won't be anything to do with Eyjafjallajokull.

*You can find the answer here.

Consider, if you would, a theoretical lonely hearts ad. Peripatetic puzzle fanatic seeks similar. Must be rolling in Benjamins, like primary colors, travel, the eternal quest for knowledge, and free food, including the stuff in trays found on airplanes. Is this perhaps the secret message that ITA, the company that creates the software underlying almost every online travel transaction, sent out as it looked for a buyer for its $1 billion business?

There are myriad reasons why Google and ITA would be a tight fit in the travel world, but forget about flights. When it comes to hiring talent, both Google and ITA seem to have the same thing on their minds: the ability of their future employees to solve puzzles that would cause the brains of most people bestowed with a higher-than-average IQ to start emitting smoke and a funny smell.

Here's one example of the kind of riddle that Google asks job-seekers to solve, taken from the blog of one candidate some years back.

Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?*

One of my colleagues came up with the idea of a lesbian commune--neat, but wrong. Google presents all kinds of arcane problems to potential employees of just about every sector it hires in, and expects its workers to be able to provide clever, original and bang-on-the-nose solutions to the questions. Potential software engineers are directed to the Topcoder website, where there are a bunch of competitions for the uber-gray mattered programmers to get their synapses round.

And it turns out that ITA is no different. As well as the "Current Hiring Puzzles" on the company's website which, if I didn't have a day job, I'd be more than happy to spend the afternoon doing, there's one about strawberries. Yum, I thought. Summer's here, it's almost lunchtime in the UK, why not? And then I noticed the words "computer," and "scientist," followed by the phrase, "write a program."

Any dense cloud you see hovering over West London this afternoon probably won't be anything to do with Eyjafjallajokull.

*You can find the answer here.

Yishan Wong, who has played a key role in growing Facebook into the social networking juggernaut it is today, is leaving the company, we've learned and confirmed with a Facebook spokesperson.

People come and go all the time of course, but Wong's departure is noteworthy because he has managed quite some important engineering projects at Facebook over the past few years.

Wong joined Facebook in late 2005 as a software engineer after a prior 4.5 year stint as senior engineering director at PayPal.

As he once wrote on his personal website, the engineering department back then was only 30 people strong (there are several hundreds now), and Wong worked his way up to Director of Engineering until voluntarily scaling back a bit last year.

Wong played an instrumental role in Facebook's (frequently lauded) internationalization efforts he came up with the idea for crowd-sourcing translations and is credited as an inventor on multiple patents related to those initiatives. As Director of Engineering, he also oversaw the Ads and Payments teams, where the self-serve ads system that makes Facebook so much money today was built though the ill-fated Beacon project was also developed on his watch.

Furthermore, the Platform team and what one would now refer to as the Applications team (photos, events, groups, notes, inbox, chat, etc.) also reported to Wong for some time, and he spent a lot of his time assisting in the recruitment of people (he's the original author of Facebook Puzzles, for example) and mentoring new managers who joined the company over the years. Most recently, he was involved on mobile-related developments at Facebook, including the Location efforts that are currently in the works.

So why is Wong leaving and what's next?

From what we can gather, this particular departure involves not an ounce of drama (regretful, we know) and although he's been with the company for quite some time he'll be mostly missed over there for the stuff he's done in the past and his personality. Today is his last day at the office, and we hear he'll be working on a project of his own for the foreseeable future.

(Picture via Dave McClure)

What it is: Neo K12 is an outstanding online collection of educational videos, lessons and games for students in grades k-12. Neo K12 believes that kids learn best by 'seeing' the real world. They have created this site with that belief in mind. Neo K12 has cataloged the best free online educational videos from the Internet in one place. Each video is watched and reviewed by k-12 educators to ensure their accuracy and appropriateness for students. Subjects include physical science, life science, human body, earth and space, social studies, math, English (including phonics, stories, and grammar), and fun videos such as time lapse, slow motion, arts and crafts, learn magic, music lessons, and sports lessons. In addition to videos, Neo K12 has Web 2.0 tools. The School Presentation tool is a mashup of Flickr and Wikipedia, and allows users to create and share presentations online. To create a presentation, students choose pictures for their presentation from Flickr, read and article about the subject from Wikipedia, and then add text to their presentation. When the presentation is finished, it can be printed or viewed online as a slideshow. Quizzes, games, and puzzles on Neo K12 are an interactive way to improve learning. Teachers can create and share videos playlists complete with notes and instructions for their students.

How to integrate Neo K12 into the classroom: Videos provide excellent opportunities for learning, they make it possible for kids to visualize and build a model in their minds. This helps them to better understand key concepts and can stimulate curiosity in a subject. When students or teachers search a subject, they are given a list of related videos, quizzes, games, and puzzles. When a teacher creates an account, they can create a complete assignment within Neo K12 that includes instructions and notes for the students. Students can complete the assignment by watching videos, playing related games and creating a School Presentation that shows understanding. The presentations are easy enough for even young students to create. Primary students can skip reading the Wikipedia article and just choose pictures and add some captions about facts they learned from a video they viewed. These videos are a great way to introduce new learning, expand on previous learning, or to spark curiosity in a topic.

Many of the educational games and puzzles would be great for an interactive whiteboard as whole class activities. They could, of course, also be used as classroom center activities, or completed individually in the computer lab. The jigsaw puzzles can be used as teasers to introduce a new topic. The jigsaw puzzles use incredible images from Flickr. Have students take turns coming up to the interactive whiteboard to put puzzle pieces together. Students waiting at their seats can take guesses about what new learning you will be doing in class.

Tips: Create a free Neo K12 account, you will receive a dashboard where you can store videos, games, presentations, quizzes, and add notes and instructions. You get a unique URL for your dashboard to share.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Neo K12 in your classroom.

At recent the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, mobile app analytics startup Distimo gave a presentation with some other interesting comparisons, such the relative size of the iPhone App Store (150,000 total apps at the time) compared to the Android Market (20,000) and Blackberry (5,000) others.

It showed that in January alone, the Apple App store grew by 13,865 apps versus 3,005 new Android apps, 734 new Nokia Ovia apps, and 501 new Blackberry apps. Android was the fastest growing App store and the Android market has more free apps (57 percent) than Apple (25%) or any other mobile app store (full slide deck embedded below).

By far the most popular category in the iPhone app store is games. Distimo reported that 58 percent of all apps in the App Store are games. And in a new report that just came out today (download it here), Distimo breaks down the game apps further by price, category, and which ones sell the most.

While the biggest category is Puzzles (15 percent), Action and Arcade both come in second with 11 percent each. The average price of a paid game in Apple's App Store is $2.24, much cheaper than Blackberry games ($4.60) or Windows Mobile games ($4.90), and a little bit above Android games (2.08).

Breaking down further by category in the Apple App store, the most expensive games are in the Role Playing category, with an average price of $7.96. Action and Arcade games are cheaper with average prices of $1.68 and $1.39 respectively. Adventure games are in the middle with an average price of $4.43.

But when you look the top grossing games, 22 percent are in the Action category, 12 percent are in Arcade, and 9 percent are Adventure. Those are the top three grossing categories. Only 5 percent of the top grossing games are role playing games. (Click on charts at right to enlarge).

So the top-grossing games are not necessarily the ones with the highest price points, especially as game developers switch to free or 99-cent games with in-app purchases. According to Distimo, Tap Tap Revenge 3, which became free and upsells songs via in-app purchases grossed more in January than the FIFA 2010 soccer game, which sells for $6.99. Quality games can still command higher prices, but getting players to pay more over time seems to be the strategy many top mobile game developers are pursuing.

Puzzles can help develop your intuition -- figuring how to navigate a grid helped me understand combinations and permutations.

Suppose you're on a 4 6 grid, and want to go from the bottom left to the top right. How many different paths can you take? Avoid backtracking -- you can only move right or up.

Spend a few seconds thinking about how you'd figure it out.

Insight: Convert Pictures To Text

When considering the possible paths (tracing them out with your finger), you might whisper "Up, right, up, right...".

Why not write those thoughts down? Using "u" and "r" we can write out a path:

r r r r r r r u u u u

That is, go all the way right (6 r's), then all the way up (4 r's). The path in the diagram would be:

r r r r u u u u r r

Using the text interpretation, the question becomes "How many ways can we re-arrange the letters rrrrrruuuu?"

Ah, the ubiquitous combination/permutation problem -- never thought it'd be useful, eh?

Understanding Combinations And Permutations

There's several ways to see combination and permutation problems. Once the first explanation clicks, we can go back and see it a different way. When trying to build math intuition for a problem, I imagine several mental models circling a core idea. Starting with one insight, I work around to the others.

Approach 1: Start The Same

Instead of having 6 rights at 4 ups, imagine we start with 10 rights (r r r r r r r r r r).

Clearly this won't do: we need to change 4 of those rights into ups. How many ways can we pick 4 rights to change?

Well, we have 10 choices for the first 'right' to convert (see the combinations article). And 9 for the second, 8 for the third, and 7 choices for the final right-to-up conversion. There are 10 * 9 * 8 * 7 = 10!/6! = 5040 possibilities.

But, wait! We need to remove the redundancies: after all, converting moves #1 #2 #3 and #4 (in that order) is the same as converting #4 #3 #2 #1. We have 4! (4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 24) ways to rearrange the ups we picked, so we finally get:

We're just picking the items to convert (10!/6!) and dividing out the redundancies (4!).

Approach 2: Just Use the Combination Formula

Halfway through that explanation, you might have realized we were recreating the combination formula:

That's the shortcut when you know order doesn't matter. However, sometimes I'm not sure whether I need a permutation or combination from the outset. While saying "Just use C(10,4)" may be accurate, it's not helpful as a teaching tool. Sometimes it helps to re-create the situation on your own.

Approach 3: Start Different

Here's another approach: instead of letting each r and u be interchangeable, label the 'right' moves r1 to r6, and the 'up' moves u1 to u4. How many ways can we re-arrange these 10 items?

This question is easy: 10! = 3,628,800 (wow, big number). We have 10 choices for the 1st move, 9 for the second, and so on, until we have 2 choices for the 9th and only 1 for the last. Cool.

Of course, we know that "r1 r2 u1 u2" is the same path as "r2 r1 u2 u1". We can shuffle the r's and u's in their own subgroups and the path will stay the same.

• How many ways can we shuffle all 10? 10! = 3,628,800
• How many ways can we shuffle 6 r's? 6! = 720
• How many ways can we shuffle 4 u's? 4! = 24

So, we start with the total number of possibilities (10! = 3,628,800) and divide out the cases where we shuffle the r's (6! = 720) and the u's (4! = 24):

Neat! It's cool seeing the same set of multiplications and divisions in different ways, just by regrouping them.

Why is this useful?

One goal is to learn how problems can be transformed. Remember that painting of the old lady & young woman?

Do you see both? Can you switch between them? Isn't that cool?

Part of the fun of the grid-path puzzle is seeing how to look at a problem using a visual or text metaphor. The more math you learn, the more models you have available, and you can turn problems into each other.

This doesn't have to be "practical" -- it's fun to see how listing out paths can be be done simply using letters on paper.

In math lingo, problems which can be converted to each other are *isomorphic". Mathematically, they may be the same -- but from a human perspective, one may be easier than the other (like seeing the old woman or young woman first).

For the grid puzzle, we used each perspective where comfortable:

• Visualizing the grid to understand the general problem and see a single path.
• Write the paths as text to see the general format of all paths & an easy method to enumerate them

And that's the key lesson: It's completely fine to use one model to understand the idea, and another to work out the details. Math becomes difficult when we think there's only one way to approach it.

Variations and Extensions

Now that we've been building our mental models, let's tackle some harder problems.

Imagine your "grid" is actually in 3 dimensions. This is harder to draw, but the text representation keeps on working. Let's say we have a cube (x, y and z dimensions) that is 5 units long on each side. How many paths are there from one corner to its opposite?

Hrm. In this case, I might try the second approach, where we listed out all the possibilities. Assume we label each move differently: we have 5 uniquely-labeled moves of each type (x1-x5, y1-y5, z1-z5). We can arrange these in 15! ways (it's a huge: 1.3 trillion). But, we need to remember to divide out the redundancies for each dimension.

There are 5! ways to rearrange the 5 identical motions in each direction, and we divide them out:

Wow, that's huge number of paths on a small cube! Earlier today you'd have trouble with the question -- I know I would have. But starting with the grid example and converting it to text, we've beefed up our model to handle 3 dimensions. Paths in four, five our 10-d should be no problem.

Redefining The Problem

Here's the fun part: instead of changing how we see the solution, why not change the problem? What else could "Find paths on a grid" represent?

• Trap platform: Let's say you're making a set of trapdoors 4 6, with only 1 real path through (the others drop you into a volcano). What are the chances someone randomly walks through? With a 46 it's 210, as before. With a 1212 grid it's 24!/12!12! = 2.7 million paths, with only 1 correct one.

• Order of operations: Suppose you have 10 sets of exercises to do: 4 identical leg exercises, and 6 identical arm exercises. How many different routines can you pick? This is the same as navigating the path, except the axis labels are "legs" and "arms" instead of "right" and "up".

• Random walk. Suppose we know an object moves randomly up or right. What's the chance it hits our desired endpoint after 10 steps? Well, there are 2^10 = 1024 ways to move up or right (pick "u" or "r" 10 times), and 210 ways to get to our exact destination. Therefore, you can expect to hit our spot 210 / 1024 = 20.5% of the time!

Here's a calculator to play with a few variations:

Onward and Upward

Puzzles are a fun way to learn new mental models, and deepen your understanding for the ones you're familiar with. While I might "know" combinations and permutations, it's not until I recognize them in the wild do I feel really comfortable. Ideas do no good sitting inside your head like artifacts in a museum -- they need to be taken out and played with. Happy math.

I can't imagine the $30,000 Superplexus puzzle as a real product. All I see is a boy who's trapped some sort of ligneous, sapient life form in a sphere. And he's spinning it, slowly. [HammacherSchlemmer via TheGreenHead via OhGizmo!]

There are countless Flash games on the web, but weeding through them to find the one you're looking for can be a challenge. Heyzap the first company out of Y Combinator's latest batch of startups, is looking to offer users a comprehensive database of the web's best games, along with the ability to embed those games wherever they'd like. In short, they're looking to become a YouTube for Flash gaming.

But unlike YouTube, founders Immad Akhund and Jude Gomila say that Heyzap isn't necessarily meant to serve as a destination site, but is instead focusing on its widget (which has an integrated catalog of available games) as well as forming partnerships with publishers looking to integrate Flash games into their sites. The widget itself seems fairly well designed, with games sorted into categories like Sports and Puzzles. However, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to search by keyword, which could become frustrating if you want to search for a specific game.

The site currently offers over 4000 games, which come from a variety of sites including Addicting Games and Kongegrate (both of which offer embedding, so the games aren't scraped). Akhund says that many of these games come from Mochi Media, which is sharing advertising revenue with Heyzap through a rev share agreement. The site will also earn money from games that developers independently upload to the site.

I think Heyzap's biggest chance at success will lie in forming partnerships with popular sites looking to cleanly integrate Flash games without any development costs (for example, lifestyle sites and magazine homepages might use the games to increase engagement). As a destination site Heyzap will have a great deal of difficulty dealing with more established sites like Addicting Games and Kongegrate, which offer game catalogs of their own. Another contender in this space is Game Curry, which we covered in October.

This isn't Immad Akhund's first run at a Y Combinator company - he co-founded Clickpass, which was recently acquired by Synthasite.

To try out the widget for yourself, click on the button below:

heyzap.com - free online games

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Last summer, Cyan Worlds released a port of their PC classic Myst on the iPhone platform. The iPhone version was pretty much an exact copy of the PC version, except all mouse inputs were replaced with on-screen inputs. According to a recent post on the Myst Online Forums, it seems Cyan Worlds will be releasing the sequel to Myst, Riven, to the iPhone later this summer.

Riven takes place immediately after the events of Myst, and just like Myst, players interact with prerendered environments to solve various puzzles in order to progress through the game's story. The puzzles in both Myst and Riven are some of the most thought provoking puzzles I've ever experienced in any video game in all of my life. I thought the puzzles in Return to Zork were tough, but all that changed when I played Myst & Riven.

[Via TUAW]

Related News from IntoMobile:

• Myst for iPhone Previewed
• Prison Break mobile game coming in June, first screenshots are here
• Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs coming for iPhone (very) soon!
• Fling for iPhone is Fun, Fun, Fun!
• DChoc Cafe Sudoku hits N-gage

Last week, Microsoft posted a slew of non-security updates for Windows 7, one of which was titled as follows: "An update is available to improve the stability and the reliability of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2." Unfortunately, according to a thread on Microsoft TechNet, the update (KB977074) is actually breaking the stability and reliability of the operating system.

"I [j]ust installed this update and my system hangs/freeze[s] at the windows bootup screen," the thread starter wrote. Another user went a little more in-depth: "At shutdown the PC often hangs with a message that a program is still running. Forcing program end does not work. The PC hangs for minutes until I press the PC's power button. During one startup, a message came up indicating I needed to validate Windows 7. Therefore the PC lost the validation information. The revalidate succeeded. Shutdown problems consistently occur after running media center. Also have problems with recorded TV programs. Intermittently can't burn a recorded TV program to disc. After this failure occurs, a subsequent shutdown produces a hang 100% of the time."

Nov. 20. 1905

J. H. Todd
1212 Webster St.
San Francisco, Cal.

Dear Sir,

Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand. The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link. It puzzles me to make out how the same hand could have constructed your letter and your advertisements. Puzzles fret me, puzzles annoy me, puzzles exasperate me; and always, for a moment, they arouse in me an unkind state of mind toward the person who has puzzled me. A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed and I shall probably even be praying for you; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.

Adieu, adieu, adieu!

Mark Twain

Filed under: App Review

TUAWHands on with WordCrasher: word puzzles meet Tetris originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nerdy idea!

I've personally never wished for a puzzle game hosted by the ghost of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, and I'm fairly confident that most people could say the same thing. In spite of this, the good people at Fuzzi Tail Software have delivered that exact experience in Mondrian, a challenging and visually pleasing puzzler brought to you by Piet Mondrian, who needs you to unscramble his masterpieces so he can enjoy the afterlife in peace.

While the puzzles in Mondrian are similar in design to the artwork of Piet Mondrian, they are not identical, as some concessions had to be made to make the game playable (they don't have the same grid-like black lines that Piet used in his art). Your goal is to duplicate each image provided in as few moves as possible. The target image can be checked as often as a player needs by touching the "solution" button in the bottom-left of the screen, and Piet Mondrian can be summoned to provide tips should a player get stuck.

The game board is populated with various tiles which can be moved about freely. Tiles are moved across the screen by a swipe, but their movement can only be stopped by another tile or wall. Basic, colored tiles can be used to block each other's path, black tiles can't be moved, numbered tiles must be moved precisely the same number of times as the number displayed on the tile itself, grey tiles adapt the color of the tiles they touch, and "merge" tiles can occupy the same space as indentically colored tiles.

Mondrian takes players on a mission to solve puzzles through numerous countries and continents around the world (beginning in Canada and ending in the USA). Each time one of the aforementioned game elements is introduced for the first time, Piet will come out and give a short lesson on how things work, so players won't ever be completely lost so long as they pay attention to the famous painter. If you're like me, that won't be hard to do, as the game's depiction of its namesake is pretty charming; Piet's dialogue made me chuckle on more than one occasion.

Although there aren't a massive number of levels in Mondrian (69 total) the levels that are included are so challenging that anyone who downloads the game is in for quite a few hours of brain-tingling puzzles. Also adding on to the total number of hours that players can get from the title, levels feature a par that indicates the minimum number of moves needed to complete so those interested can redo them later if they wish to improve their scores.

While I like the challenge that Mondrian offers, I think that the difficulty level might ramp up a little bit too quickly for most players. Levels do start out simply, but from about the second world location on to the end, puzzles are REALLY hard. This makes the puzzles much more satisfying to complete, but simultaneously could alienate less deft players.

The worst part about the difficulty is that all the levels in a world location must be completed before players can move on to any other level in the game. This is the sort of design mistake that can really cause problems, bottlenecking players on one or two levels that they just don't understand when the game should simply allow players to move on and come back to a particularly difficult level later if they so wish.

Mondrian offers up a hearty challenge for anyone who enjoys a good brain-teaser. The difficulty is a tad high on this one, so if you're not often in the mood to get the brain juices flowing, it might not be for you.

App Store Link: Mondrian, $2.99

In Menu Mind Games, William Poundstone dissects this Balthazar menu (full size PDF) and tells you the logic behind its design.

Can you guess the tricks being used here? Click image to find out.

The piece offers a revealing look at how restaurants use typography and layout to drive customers toward high priced items. Also interesting is the strange jargon used by industry insiders, like puzzles, anchors, stars, and plowhorses.

A star is a popular, high-profit itemin other words, an item for which customers are willing to pay a good deal more than it costs to make. A puzzle is high-profit but unpopular; a plowhorse is the opposite, popular yet unprofitable. Consultants try to turn puzzles into stars, nudge customers away from plowhorses, and convince everyone that the prices on the menu are more reasonable than they look.

Related:
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone [Amazon]
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill [Amazon]

It's amazing to me the amount of innovation brought on by comapnies opening API's for developers to tap into. Everything from allowing 3rd party applications to run within your site to API's that let developers pull all your data and do cool things with it.

It reminds me of the whole Open Source movement, but better. I love Open Source. I use it everyday in my life but if I had to choose between getting a companies source code versus getting that companies data? I'd choose data any day.

(Yes I realize Open Source is a licensing thing not just a code thing but let me play out my analogy)

API's also seem more benefitial to everyone involved. By opening up your API, you're encouraging comapnies to do somethine additive with it, not duplicative to what you're already doing (which source code lends itself to).

Data is unique. Code seems like a commodity (before my developer friends flog me I see a very real distinction between code and *good* code). You can't replicate the kind of data that you get from Twitter and Facebook but you could replicate it's code (as if you'd want to) very easily.

Maybe I'm just being shortsighted because I'm not a developer. What do you think?

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What will the future of social media look like? You just need to look around because The future is already here it is just unevenly distributed.

In rapid order I came across three articles that help paint that picture (all emphasis are mine):

Marc Meyer rightfully points out:

So I ask you, what is next? Social Media as you know it right now, will not be recognizable in the next 3-5 years. Think long term.

Chas Edwards discusses the success of Digg ads and hints at the future of advertising filtered by (and I'll throw in co-created with) their customers:

Digg Ads: It's Just the Beginning

As marketers perfect their skills as web publishers and invest more aggressively in content creation content about their products and services, as well as general content that might be useful to their customers it creates an opportunity for better advertising experiences: ads we don't feel the need to block, skip or ignore. Digg Ads, we hope, will give those marketers a real-world proving ground a place to measure their success in making content that's relevant to their customers.

Now combine that with the LA Times story about how Google Wave (and many of the technologies coming out that are similar) could transform reporting:

Collaborative reporting: You may notice that double bylines aren't very common. That's because trying to co-author a news story stinks.

The process usually [...] result in a mess of incompatible and unrelated research that gets either thrown out or somewhat-awkwardly wiggled in.

We're not going to e-mail our co-writers with every new lead and minute detail we dig up. But if we're sharing a virtual notebook, we can scan through

or search the newest findings as they're logged, make comments and highlight our favorite bits.

Then, when it comes time to write, we can rearrange and discuss the story's flow in the same software. Thanks to the openness of Wave, collaborative pieces between bloggers could become more common.

To be fair collaborative, real-time or (what Shel Israel calls) Braided Journalism, has already been happening but it's primitive compared to what is to come.

• Imagine for a minute that this blogger collaboration doesn't have to be limited to bloggers or journalist writing for the same publication.
• Imagine that the story was reported on in real time in the public as it evolved.
• Imagine if the readers were invited to participate it the reporting.
• And finally imagine that marketers were invited into the journalism process and their contribution was judged for the value it added not the value of the ad buy.

What do you see now? I see a new business model for journalism. I see relevant advertising. I see a world in 3-5 years where journalism and advertising are better than anything we've ever had before.

As I think about this new model I think of the idiocy behind pay walls and intrusive advertising and for the first time in a long time I'm optimistic for the future of both advertising and journalism.

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Last weekend I bumped into puzzle maker Bram Cohen at Make HQ, where we had the opportunity to check out some of his amazing mechanical puzzles and talk a bit about the various processes with which they are made (please excuse the A/V quality of my mobile).

One of the tools Bram uses to make these mind bending objects is a piece of software called Burr Tools. It's a 3D design program that builds puzzles out of basic units. Puzzles created with Burr Tools can be exported to an STL shape file that can be printed on a 3D printer.

Bram also showed off a prototype he designed that was milled from hardwood by a friend on their woodworking mill.

We also get to see Bram's first commercial puzzle. It's called "Cast Marble" by Hanayama. It's a captive marble inside a block. Both the marble and block are composed of cast metal segments that twist and turn into each other.

In a recently published scientific study (see Hall C, et al Cognitive activities delay onset of memory decline in persons who develop dementia Neurology 2009; 73: 356-361), Hall and colleagues examined how education and stimulating activities may interact to contribute to cognitive reserve. The study involved 488 initially healthy people, average age 79, who enrolled in the Bronx Aging Study between 1980 and 1983. These individuals were followed for 5 years with assessments every 12 to 18 months (starting in 1980). At the start of the study, all participants were asked how many cognitive activities (reading, writing, crossword puzzles, board or card games, group discussions, or playing music) they participated in and for how many days a week. Researchers were able to evaluate the impact of self-reported participation these activities on the onset of accelerated memory decline in 101 individuals who developed dementia during the study.

Results showed that for every "activity day" (participation in one activity for one day a week) the subjects engaged in, they delayed for about two months the onset of rapid memory loss associated with dementia. Interestingly, the positive effect of brain-stimulating activities in this study appeared to be independent of a person's level of education.

This is great news as it suggests that it is never too late to try to build up brain reserve. The more brain stimulating activities one does and the more often, the better for a stronger cognitive reserve.

The cognitive reserve hypothesis suggests that individuals with more cognitive reserve can experience more Alzheimer's disease pathology in the brain (more plaques and tangles) without developing Alzheimer's disease symptoms.

How does that work? Scientists are not sure but two possibilities are considered.
1. One is that more cognitive reserve means more brain reserve, that is more neurons and connections between neurons.
2. Another possibility is that more cognitive reserve means more compensatory processes (see my previous post Education builds Cognitive Reserve for Alzheimers Disease Protection for more details.)

Now, one may wonder about the difference types of mental stimulation available, including not only puzzles and such, but structured activities such as brain fitness software and meditation. Do we exercise our brain every time we think about something? What can one do to exercise one's brain in ways that enhance capacity? Does aerobic fitness training also exercise one's brain? What types of methodologies and products are available? Do they work? Are all the same?

Those are the types of questions we wanted to address in the book The SharpBrains Guide To Brain Fitness (available via Amazon.com). We are proud of the recognition the book has started to obtain, including endorsements by leading scientists:

"The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness is the only book that I know of that seamlessly integrates latest information about cognitive health across the lifespan, with interviews with active researchers examining cognitive maintenance and enhancement, along with reviews of commercial products targeted to cognitive enhancement. The book should be very useful to anyone interested in brain care, both health care professionals and the public at large".
- Arthur Kramer, Professor of Psychology at University of Illinois

"This SharpBrains book provides a very valuable service to a wide community interested in learning and brain topics. I found it interesting and helpful"
- Michael Posner, Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon, and first recipient of the Dogan Prize

References:

- Study: Hall C, et al Cognitive activities delay onset of memory decline in persons who develop dementia Neurology 2009; 73: 356-361

- Book: The SharpBrains Guide To Brain Fitness: 18 Interviews with Scientists, Practical Advice, and Product Reviews, to Keep Your Brain Sharp

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When I was ten years old I solved my first Rubik's Cube. That's right, I took all the stickers off and put them back on the right way. Last weekend I decided that it was time for me to learn how to solve it the right way.

To solve it yourself, you're going to have to run out and buy one for yourself (if you don't have one already). I'd recommend the nearest toy store, but you can also buy it over on Amazon if you want.

Rubik's Cube Brain Teaser Puzzle with Helpful Hints

First Step: Mess It Up!

That's right, you'll want to do a really good job of twisting and turning it until it's completely messed up. If you don't do this, you can't claim that you really solved it. Even better: get somebody else to help mess it up for you. When you are done it should look something like this, although it might not glow quite the same.

Photo by huangjiahui

Next Step: Learn the Algorithms

For whatever reason, nobody reads instruction manuals. If you buy a new Rubik's Cube, there's usually a set of instructions that come with it, explaining the algorithms that you need to use to solve the cube.

An algorithm is a set of moves you have to follow that will put all the pieces back into the right placeexcept usually for the one that you want to move to a different edge. For instance, if you are holding the cube as indicated in the picture above, you could turn the right face counter-clockwise, the bottom clockwise, the right face clockwise, and the bottom clockwise. If you repeated this step a number of times the bottom front square would then move to the top, and if you repeated even more times the cube would return to exactly the way it was.

The instruction manual explains each step, just make sure to read very carefully.

Solving the Rubik's Cube by Example

Here's where it gets a lot more fun, and a lot more easy to understand. A programmer named Cedric Beust created an entire guide with animated illustrations of every step. You can click the Play button to watch the animation, or even rotate the cube around with your mouse to get a better view.

He walks through solving each layer starting with making a cross on the first layer (similar to the official instructions). He illustrates the movesfor instance in the left cube you will move the front face clockwise, then the down face clockwise, then move the front face counter-clockwise. Remember that you can hit the play button to see it in action.

Then he'll explain how to solve the next layers, and so forth.

Don't be intimidated by the number of stepsjust perform them really slowly and you'll eventually be able to solve it.

Visit Cedric Beust's Guide to Solving the Rubik's Cube

Memorizing the Algorithms

This is where it gets more tricky, memorizing the actual moves. I recommend memorizing each set of moves one at a timeafter you have solved the cube using the guide. So the next time you try to solve the cube, you'll do two of the sets of moves by memory, then finish the rest with the guide. Once you've got that figured out really well, start memorizing the next step.

You'll find that as you start performing the moves from memory, your hands will learn the movements and your brain won't have to think about each moveyou'll just do it.

Solved from Memory? You are awesome!

So far, the best I've been able to manage is around 3 minutes per solve. Most serious Rubik's Cube enthusiasts can do much better, solving the cube in less than a minutewhich is nothing compared to the world champions, who solve in 20 seconds or less. Amazing!

My inspiration for learning to solve the Cube came after watching this video of actor Will Smith solving it in 55 seconds. (If you are reading in an RSS or email reader, you'll need to click through to the article to watch it)

So how fast can you solve the Cube?

It is a rare kids' book that is popular despite being over 400 pages long and written by someone other than J.K. Rowling. I'll admit I was a bit skeptical about The Mysterious Benedict Society's ability to hold my kids' interest, since it's a longer chapter book than any my wife and I had read with the kids before, and it has next to no illustrations (merely one small one at the beginning of each chapter).

Thankfully, my skepticism was misplaced. The book is chockablock with puzzles of all sorts, which are woven into the story in such a way that the reader/listener is challenged to solve them along with the protagonists. My nearly-eight-year-old son, who loves puzzles nearly as much as I do, was captivated by this aspect of the book, though my six-year-old daughter less so. Don't think the puzzles are all the book has to offer, though: It has great characters, a solid plot, and a great deal of humor mixed into a serious story.

The Mysterious Benedict Society introduces us to four amazing kids, who will later form the title group: Reynie Muldoon, George "Sticky" Washington, Kate Wetherall, and Constance Contraire. They are all parentlessthree are orphans, and one is a runawayand they are brought together through a series of tests by a man named Mr. Benedict. He has a mission for them with the ultimate goal of doing no less than saving the world, from a mind control scheme so devious that only a team of very gifted children (each gifted in his/her own way) can possibly hope to conquer it. If this sounds quirky, it is, but there's a great deal more detail involved that I don't wish to reveal for fear of ruining some of the great surprises the book has in store.

The author, Trenton Lee Stewart, has a great gift for storytelling. This book will join the His Dark Materials and Harry Potter books on the shelves of our house in the section of books written for kids that my wife and I would gladly read by ourselves. He has a near-Dickensian gift for characters' names, with (among others) a villain named Ledroptha Curtain and a comic secondary character named S.Q. Pedalian (who, ironically, stumbles over every long word he uses). A lot of the puzzle and mystery resolutions are predictable by adults, but much less so by kids, and the characters and plot are captivating enough that you'll barely notice, anyway.

The Mysterious Benedict Society , by Trenton Lee Stewart, is available in paperback for a list price of $6.99. Its sequel, which my kids, my wife, and I are now dying to read, is The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey , and is available in hardcover for a list price of $16.99. The official website for the books is really well done, too, and well worth a look.