Tech Book Face Off: The Shallows Vs. Thinking, Fast and Slow

After my book review on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning and How the Brain Learns, I received a recommendation to read another book, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. I decided to go with it (thanks +Helton Moraes), and I ended up pairing this book with another popular book on how the brain works and how we humans think, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Through these books I have a personal goal (it's good to have a goal when reading) of finding ways to regain control of my mind and hopefully improve my thought processes. Do these books help clear a path to that goal? Let's see.

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Practice Programming Through Play

I'm a big fan of puzzle games for exercising your mental muscles while having some fun at the same time. Solving puzzles through your own powers of thought gives a certain kind of satisfaction that is especially rewarding. Games like Sudoku, Tetris, and Rubik's Cube are great for strengthening mathematical thinking and visual-spacial intelligence.

Nowadays we seem to have an endless supply of puzzle games on mobile devices to keep our minds occupied during all of the spare moments of the day. It's fine to use puzzle games to fill up the empty spaces of time, but I've found some games that entice me to go much deeper. Lately I've been getting into games geared towards introducing kids to programming concepts. Lightbot and Cargo-Bot are games that teach young kids the basics of programming by setting up sequences of simple instructions for on-screen robots to carry out in pursuit of a goal. While these are kids' games, and quite good ones at that, I've also found them to be excellent practice tools for me.