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Solving puzzles is something both children and adults love to do during their free time. Puzzles can serve as a source of entertainment but they also keep the brain moving and working.
See the fact file below for more information on the puzzles or alternatively, you can download our 24-page Puzzles worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.
Key Facts & Information
BRIEF HISTORY
- Jigsaw puzzles are the most common type of puzzle. They are pictures made of cardboard or wood that have been cut into differently shaped pieces and the solver must fit them together to be able to see the whole picture.
- Puzzles started with jigsaw puzzles.
- John Spilsbury, an engraver and mapmaker from London, invented the first jigsaw puzzle in 1767.
- The first jigsaw puzzle was a map of the world and was used as an aid to teach geography.
- In 1865, the fret treadle saw was invented, which made creating different shapes easier.
- Children’s puzzles have moved from just being used for lessons to a source of entertainment, showing diverse subjects like animals, nursery rhymes, and modern tales of superheroes.
- In around 1900, adult puzzles started to emerge.
- By 1908, a full-blown puzzle craze was in progress in the United States.
- Back then, puzzles were quite a challenge since pieces were cut exactly on the color lines, leaving no space for transition colors.
- Puzzles back then were expensive since wood puzzles had to be cut one piece at a time. A 500-piece puzzle typically cost $5, while the average worker earned $50 per month.
- However, high society embraced puzzles as a means of entertainment, so peak sales occurred on Saturday mornings when customers bought puzzles for their weekend house parties.
- In 1909, Parker Brothers devoted their entire factory to manufacturing puzzles.
- In 1929, because of the Great Depression, the popularity of puzzles decreased greatly until 1933 when sales reached an astounding 10 million per week.
- The introduction of die-cut cardboard puzzles was another turning point in the production of puzzles, especially since inexpensive cardboard allowed manufacturers to mass produce puzzles.
PUZZLE TYPES
- Generally, a puzzle is anything that is designed to entertain the solver, and to which a well-defined solution exists.
- Puzzles can be divided into different types. Some of these categories are tiling puzzles, mechanical puzzles, tour puzzles, and logic puzzles.
- Tiling puzzles are a type of puzzle that involves two-dimensional problems in which a number of shapes must be assembled.
- The most common example of a tiling puzzle is the jigsaw puzzle.
- A subcategory of tiling puzzle is the dissection puzzle, also called the transformation puzzle.
- Dissection puzzles are puzzles wherein a set of pieces can be assembled in different ways to create two or more distinct geometric shapes.
- The most popular example of a dissection puzzle is the Tangram.
- Tangram literally means “seven boards of skill”. It is a puzzle consisting of seven flat shapes, called tans, that are put together to form shapes.
- The objective of Tangram is to form specific shapes using all seven pieces, which cannot overlap.
- Another type of puzzle is mechanical puzzles.
- A mechanical puzzle is a type of puzzle wherein a set of mechanically linked pieces are manipulated to achieve the goal.
- One of the most well-known mechanical puzzle is the Rubik’s Cube, invented in 1974 by a Hungarian sculptor and architecture professor named Ernő Rubik.
- Most mechanical puzzles are designed for a single player.
- Another type of puzzle is the tour puzzle.
- A tour puzzle is a type of puzzle wherein the player travels around the board using a token that represents them.
- Maze puzzles are an example of this type of puzzle.
- Another type of puzzle is the logic puzzle.
- Logic puzzles are puzzles typically characterized by a grid which must be solved by following a set of well-defined rules.
- An example of a logic puzzle is Sudoku.
- Sudoku is a logic-based number-placement puzzle in which the objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 subgrids contain all the digits from 1 to 9.
BENEFITS
- Puzzles can help children develop their cognitive skills. As puzzles come in a whole range of themes and topics such as alphabets, shapes, animals, and colors, these themes and topics increase children’s visual awareness and develop their understanding of them.
- Puzzles can also help develop someone’s problem solving skill. For a solver to complete a puzzle, the solver must thing of different strategies on how to approach the problem or the puzzle at hand in order to achieve a certain goal.
- Solving puzzles also helps in developing hand-eye coordination. When children flip, turn, or remove pieces of the puzzle, they are then learning the connection between their hands and their eyes. Their eyes see the problem or the puzzle, and the brain works on how to solve it.
- Puzzles also help improve the vocabulary, memory, and overall reasoning and raise someone’s Intelligence Quotient or IQ.
- In fact, a researcher from the University of Michigan found that adults’ IQ could be boosted by four points after spending 25 minutes a day solving puzzles.
- Keeping one’s brain active helps delay the symptoms of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. In fact, studies show that keeping one’s mind active through puzzles can reduce the amount of brain cell damage.
Puzzles Worksheets
This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about the puzzles across 24 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Puzzles worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about the solving puzzles which is something both children and adults love to do during their free time. Puzzles can serve as a source of entertainment but they also keep the brain moving and working.
Complete List Of Included Worksheets
- Puzzles Facts
- Right or Left?
- Solve This
- Meet the Puzzlers
- Hidden Word
- Pick Me!
- Puzzling
- Puzzle Records
- That’s My Fave
- Let’s Play a Game
- Be a Puzzler
- Let’s Play!
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Link will appear as Puzzles Facts & Worksheets: https://kidskonnect.com - KidsKonnect, April 1, 2020
Use With Any Curriculum
These worksheets have been specifically designed for use with any international curriculum. You can use these worksheets as-is, or edit them using Google Slides to make them more specific to your own student ability levels and curriculum standards.