If you were on the site between 2:00 and 4:00 EST this morning (Thursday, March 29), you may have noticed some intermittent site outages. The server on which this site resides was undergoing significant upgrades. These are upgrades which will make the site more stable and responsive. As you play games today you will hopefully find that page loads are faster, and everything runs smoothly.

However, whenever there are significant upgrades, there is always the possibility of unexpected glitches. If you are using any portion of the site and discover that something isn't working right, you can let us know about the problems you're experiencing by visiting the Ask Professor Puzzler page and submitting a report.

Most of the games on this site are either word games or math games. There are a few miscellaneous puzzles and quizzes, but one thing we've never had on this site is an art game. That has now changed. Just this week the games "Color Picker" and "Closest Color" were added to the site. These games are both quizzes which are designed to help art students look at a color and recognize where it lies on the color spectrum, how saturated it is, and how light it is.

This is very useful for students who are interested in painting, and want to understand how hue, saturation, and lightness work together to form a color. A good understanding of these components will be of great value to artists who want to be able to match colors they mix to colors they see.

Color Picker Game: This game consists of 10 color swatches, and three slider bars. The slider bars allow you to select what you think the components of the color are. If you are "in the ballpark" the game moves to the next swatch - otherwise, you are required to adjust your sliders in order to zero in on the correct color. You can earn bonus points by being close or exact on the first try.

Closest Color Game: In this game you will be shown a swatch, and then three swatches which are similar to it, either in hue, saturation, or lightness. Your job is to identify the closest match.

We are working on developing a section of art games for the site - here is the page where new games will be added: Art Games.