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!
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
- Vote once a day: show two puzzlements, students vote on which one moves on. This would take 15 days.
- 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.
- 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!).
- Van Gogh painting on water
- Teachers, Ping-Pong Balls, and Zero-G
- Circles in an Optical Illusion
- In-Camera Lighting
- A Rubik’s Cube LEGO Robot
- Preposterous Animations
- Single Stroke Art
- Helicopter Rotors Illusion
- T-Rex Illusion
- This flag Isn’t Waving
- Baby Names Over Time
- Super Magnet
- Drawing Perfect Circles
- A Bridge Moving Out Of The Way
- Melting Ice Cream Bars
- Pencil Lead Sculptures
