We developed a poster exercise for 1st‐year medical students to help prepare them to deal with an ever‐expanding base of biomedical information using computer software available in a medical practice almost anywhere. Students use the Grateful Med software to search the National Library of Medicine MEDLINE databases to retrieve literature references from which they explore a topic in an area of neuroscience and subsequently prepare, present, and defend their findings in a poster at a meeting intended to simulate a Society for Neuroscience poster session. The exercise gives students an opportunity to work in small groups, to examine a specific topic in depth, and with the help of a faculty preceptor, to organize information, to discover resources needed to prepare a poster presentation, and to prepare the poster. In addition, the exercise offers a forum to teach critical appraisal of the literature and for the students to discover the nature and limits of scientific data, conclusions, and knowledge. Most students applauded this “fun and low pressure”; exercise, and the faculty found it “a great way to teach students.”;