DiscoverySchool.com

https://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com

Need a quick way to engage your students? Try DiscoverySchool.com. There are many online resources for creating puzzles and crosswords, but Discovery School’s Puzzlemaker has got to be among the best.

This puzzle generation tool makes it easy for parents and students to customise their own puzzles. There are at least 10 different types of puzzles to choose from, including crosswords, word searches, mazes and maths puzzles.

Puzzlemaker is so easy to use – not to mention so much fun – that you’ll want to try all the puzzles. Just key in the answer and the clues, and the computer does the rest, all within minutes. The puzzles can be printed from the browser, or saved and incorporated into worksheets.

Two teachers who have found this a useful tool in their teaching practice are Mrs Sylvelin Wong and Ms Amelia Anne Silvarayan from Coral Secondary School (now merged with Siglap Secondary School to become Meridian Secondary School). They discovered the website while trying to figure out how they could inject a fun and competitive element into their English Literature classrooms, to get their students more engaged in learning.

The students had been studying the Literature text for two terms already when their teachers brought them to the computer lab.

Mrs Wong describes the process: “We gave them a few guidelines on how big we wanted the crossword puzzle to be. From there, they basically did their own self-enquiring process, searched through the text, and came up with questions on their own. And after that, we just printed out the puzzles from the website.”

This whole activity took two periods (about 70 minutes). They then used the puzzles to pit their skills against other groups in the class, to see who could create the most challenging puzzle.

“We used DiscoverySchool.com because they enjoy crossword puzzles, and this one gives them an opportunity to create it,” explains Ms Silvarayan. “When they type in the clues, it makes them think a lot about the content of the text and the kind of questions that they want to ask, which is a bit of a higher order skill – they have to think about the questions themselves.

“And because of that challenge, competing with one another, they don’t want to give questions that are too easy, so they go into a process of self-evaluation, questioning each other, and looking and analysing the questions. So we found that to be a very useful tool for them to create something of their own.”

So, the next time you need to inject some fun into your classroom, be sure to check out DiscoverySchool.com’s Puzzlemaker!