Brainfinity - The Memory Game

The classic memory game with an extra psychological twist for education. 

Teach your students psychological principles of sensory processing and memory while engaging in a fun and challenging game!

A board of 36 pieces with 6 tokens of each color on the top, as well as six of each color of ring marker on the bottom. Magnetized for easy play and storage.

How to Play:
Each turn, remove two pieces from the board and reveal them.
If the colored rings on the bottom of the pieces match, remove them from the board.
If the colored rings do not match, return them to where they were taken from.
Continue taking pairs of pieces from the board until you have cleared the board.
Count the number of turns it took to clear the Brainfinity Board, and challenge others to beat you.

Two-Player Variant:
Play as above, but alternating turns. 

When a player lifts pieces, they must reveal them to the other player as well. 

When a match is found, the player keeps the pieces.

The player with the most pieces at the end of the game wins.


The Psychology Being Investigated:
I created this game to demonstrate a number of principles in my psychology classroom. I have found these rewarding for students to apply, but also rewarding as a teacher because they reveal things to students about their memories that can be applied to their studying and their lives in general. Double win!

Interference: The fact that the tops of pieces and the bottoms of pieces do not match in color can interfere with memory performance (similar to the Stroop Effect (try a demonstration of the Stroop Effect HERE)).

Memory Strategies: Students struggle with getting score below around 32 without developing some sort of strategy, which opens up lots of opportunities to think more about the psychology of memory. For example, you can teach them various methods of Elaborative Encoding, like the Method of Loci to  encourage them to tie memories of piece locations to locations in a more familiar environment. 

Systematic Exploration and Chunking: Students can learn more generally that their cognition can be externalised, for example by exploring the grid in order, rather than randomly. Externalisation in this sense increases the ability to use memory strategies like Chunking, where information is condensed and bound in a more memorable form. For example if they have used three turns to reveal the top row as Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Orange, Red (as in the picture) they could instead try to remember this as a ‘weird word’ by adding the vowel ‘a’ between each color - so the top row is YaGaBaPORa. When they subsequently reveal pieces, this chunked work makes the location of the matching piece easier to remember, and can just be modified when a piece is removed. So they next draw an Orange piece, using YaGaBaPORa to remember that orange is in fifth, remove it, and their word becomes YaGaBaPaRa.