Computer scientists at Carnegie-Mellon University have found using games to educate users about phishing scams is more effective than expecting us to read security manuals. As part of their research, they developed Anti-Phishing Phil, an interactive game that explains how to spot phishing cues in emails, and when to use search engines to find legitimate sites.

How do you teach a computer to categorize and label photographs and other images? Identifying objects in a picture is easy for a person, but very difficult for a machine. A graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University has a found a way to solve the problem by garnering the help of hundreds of thousands of human volunteers. How? He’s turned the challenge into two fun online games. Check them out at ESP Game and Peekaboom.

Google Image Search returns dozens of pictures based on a keyword word or phrase. Now turn this idea upside down, and imagine trying to guess the keyword based on the images! That’s the premise of Grant Robinson’s addictive Guess-the-Google game. Start the game, view a set of twenty images, and see if you can guess the keyword that unites them.

Think you have to be a genius to understand the work of Nobel Prize winners? Think again. NobelPrize.org has created a suite of online games (for ages 13+) based on award-winning work in chemistry, physics, medicine, world peace economics and literature.