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Puzzlement Tournament

I’ve gone through the Puzzlements.co mailer archives and grabbed the most-clicked link from each week, seeded them, and created the first Puzzlement Tournament!

Tourney

Perfect for an end-of-year debate: which puzzlement is the greatest? 16 options arranged into four rounds. Run it however you’d like.

Three Possibilities

  1. Vote once a day: show two puzzlements, students vote on which one moves on. This would take 15 days.
  2. Vote twice per day: once for a bracket in the top half and once for a bracket in the bottom half. This would take 8 days.
  3. Do an entire round per day. This would take 4 days.

Add Criteria

I do think it’s useful to give your tournament specific criteria to focus students’ thinking. You might pick something like:

  • most interesting
  • most uplifting
  • strangest

All of these would be better than “best” or “favorite.”

The Contestants

Grab the bracket as a PDF or an Excel file (May 2018 Update: links fixed!).

Here are the 16 links if you’d like to use a different format (March 2019 Update: Links fixed again!).

  1. Van Gogh painting on water
  2. Teachers, Ping-Pong Balls, and Zero-G
  3. Circles in an Optical Illusion
  4. In-Camera Lighting
  5. A Rubik’s Cube LEGO Robot
  6. Preposterous Animations
  7. Single Stroke Art
  8. Helicopter Rotors Illusion
  9. T-Rex Illusion
  10. This flag Isn’t Waving
  11. Baby Names Over Time
  12. Super Magnet
  13. Drawing Perfect Circles
  14. A Bridge Moving Out Of The Way
  15. Melting Ice Cream Bars
  16. Pencil Lead Sculptures

This is an example of “Get Specific with Criteria”

Move from fluffy opinion questions towards brain-sweating evaluation questions by adding specific criteria.

See other examples of “Get Specific with Criteria” ❯❯




📂 Also filed under A Curiosity Guide.

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