Tag Archives: Pop culture

PuzzleNation Book Review: World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements

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Welcome to the sixth installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!

All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.

Let’s get started!

Our book review post this time around features John Hunter’s World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements.

What did you do in fourth grade, fellow puzzlers? Did you master long division, or delve into the history of the Civil War, or expand your vocabulary skills? The kids in John Hunter’s fourth-grade class negotiated lucrative trade agreements, solved global warming, and saved the world.

Yeah, I know. I feel like a slacker now too.

I frequently post articles that reinforce my heartfelt belief that puzzles and the skills we develop solving puzzles make the world a better, more interesting place. And the World Peace Game, John Hunter’s marvelous brainchild, takes empty-space learning to a whole new level.

Instead of regimented, test-based education, empty-space learning encourages students to learn and fail by doing, developing social skills, a deeper sense of the world’s complexity, and an appreciation for hard questions.

The World Peace Game is a fantastic example of what empty-space learning can do. A weeks-long interactive experiment wherein students try to solve real-world problems in a complex, multitiered simulation, kids will tackle poverty, war, environmental cataclysm, terrorism, ethical dilemmas, and more as they manage their imaginary nations.

World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements chronicles the lessons Hunter has learned from developing and running the World Peace Game for groups of all ages, offering dozens of examples of problems encountered — and circumvented — by young minds, each with a core lesson and something to celebrate.

This is pure puzzle-solving at work on a massive, cooperative scale, and just reading this book gave me hope for the future. World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements is a warm, funny, utterly optimistic testament to what creativity and innovative problem solving can accomplish.

[For further information on the World Peace Game, as well as World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements, click here.]

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, cruise our boards on Pinterest, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Bonus Friday Post: Scottish Reminder Edition!

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Hello puzzle friends and PuzzleNationers, I just have a few quick reminders to drop in this bonus Friday post!

Last week, I wrote about the National Museums Scotland invitation to the public to assist in reconstructing a 1200-year-old Scottish relic, and that website went active today! So if you’d like to put your puzzly skills to work for the greater good, check it out!

But hey, if you’re looking for something a little less challenging, you could always check out our Classic Word Search iBook (all three volumes available here!) or the Crossword app our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles put together (available here!) for some puzzly fun.

Thanks so much for your enthusiasm and support, and enjoy your weekend!

Celebrating a true elder statesman of puzzles

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Yesterday was Martin Gardner’s birthday. (And unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling well, so I apologize for not getting this post up in a more timely manner.)

If you don’t know Martin Gardner, you absolutely should.

For twenty-five years, he penned a column in Scientific American called Mathematical Games, adding a marvelous sense of puzzly spirit and whimsy to the field of mathematics, exploring everything from the works of M.C. Escher to visual puzzles like the mobius strip and tangrams.

His affection for magic, puzzles, and mathematics was infectious, and events known as Gatherings 4 Gardner began springing up. After his passing on May 22, 2010, his legacy now lives on thanks to an annual global event known as the Martin Gardner Celebration of Mind.

Magic tricks, puzzles, recreational math problems, and stories about Martin are shared by admirers and devotees, all in the hopes of maintaining and spreading the wonderful spirit of playful mathematical experimentation that Gardner embodied so brilliantly.

So today, we here at PuzzleNation invite our fellow puzzle fiends and math lovers to join us in celebrating not only Martin’s life and love of all things mathy and puzzly, but the marvelous tradition of sharing those interests with others.

And in the spirit of sharing similar puzzle joy, I proudly give you our own little contribution… the mobius bagel.

[For a complete bibliography and breakdown of the fifteen printings of Gardner’s Mathematical Games columns, click here. To check out some of his many delightful columns, click here. And to solve a number of Martin’s most popular puzzles and brain teasers, click this link provided by our friends at ThinkFun.]

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, cruise our boards on Pinterest, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Putting the “social” in social media

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One cannot overstate how the advent of social media has changed the way we interact with each other on a daily basis.

Stories and reminiscences that had to wait for high school reunions and family get-togethers are now shared over Facebook every day. Fan clubs and monthly newsletters used to be the only source for new info on your favorite bands and celebrities, but these days, they can speak directly to their fans through Twitter.

We can take people on vacation with us on Instagram and share our deepest thoughts on Tumblr. We can document baby’s first steps on YouTube and delve into virtually any subject on various blogs.

And social media has undoubtedly changed the landscape for puzzles and constructors alike.

There are entire blogs dedicated to dissecting the New York Times and Los Angeles Times crosswords each and every day. Amy Reynaldo (Diary of a Crossword Fiend) and our recent 5 Questions interviewee Kathy Matheson (Crossword Kathy) are both terrific examples of engaging crossword bloggers.

Through Twitter and other platforms, constructors are marketing their puzzles directly to solvers, bypassing publishers and sparking a new wave of entrepreneurial creativity in puzzles.

(For more on this, check out our 5 Questions interview with Robin Stears and our subsequent post on digital puzzle distribution.)

Heck, I’ve seen solvers and celebrities alike asking for help with challenging clues by reaching out to their followers on Twitter. Crowdsourcing at its best!

As PuzzleNation’s resident social media helper monkey, I’ve seen firsthand the amazing changes wrought by social media. I play games and interact daily with PuzzleNationers on Facebook, meet fellow puzzlers and innovators through Twitter, and engage in all manner of puzzly topics on Pinterest.

At the end of every blog post, I offer up links to all of our social media platforms, and every time you tweet or comment or reply or re-pin or email, I’m left in awe by how involved and how passionate the PuzzleNation audience is. Interacting with you guys is by far the best part of this gig, and I can’t wait to see what comes next from the marvelous melding of puzzles and social media.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, cruise our boards on Pinterest, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Remake history at home! (With puzzles!)

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Crowdsourcing has become an increasingly popular method for scientists and deep thinkers to solve problems that would otherwise be far too staggering a challenge to tackle on their own.

I’ve written in the past about crowdfunding efforts, but this is something different: actually handing over the problem to the public. It’s citizen science!

The National Museums Scotland are trying to reassemble the shattered design on a Scottish relic dated back to the year 800 or so, hoping that reaching out to nonprofessionals will help them to restore the intricate designs that once adorned a sandstone slab centuries past.

Every fragment has been scanned into a 3-D model and catalogued, making each a small piece of a truly monumental puzzle to be solved. (And without the picture on the box to guide you!)

From an NBC News article:

The pieces will be grouped into categories — for example, corner pieces, or parts of the design’s knotwork. That will help users organize the work into manageable subtasks, as if they were working collectively on a huge jigsaw puzzle. Suggested solutions to parts of the puzzle would be judged by fellow users, and then passed on to the professionals.

This mix of science and puzzle-gaming has engendered marvelous successes before. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (or SETI) utilizes dozens of citizen computers for processing power in order to more efficiently scan the skies for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. The FoldIt program led to the crowdsourced discovery of the structure of a monkey HIV virus in ten days, after a decade of attempts by scientists.

(There are similar puzzle-game attempts being made to map the human brain, explore the potential of DNA, and catalogue animal species. Check out this IO9 link for further details.)

This is yet another amazing example of puzzle solving making a true contribution to our understanding of the world. And it’s always nice to remind ourselves that puzzles can be all fun and games, but they can also be something much much more.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Puzzles to the rescue once again!

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Puzzles. They improve our vocabularies, mitigate our boredom, keep our minds keen and our detective skills in fine working order.

I’m always expounding on the many benefits of a puzzly lifestyle, and wouldn’t you know it, I’ve discovered yet another way that puzzles make our lives better.

Apparently, according to researchers at Western Washington University, they can also help us fight back against the musical scourge known as earworms.

Earworms are also known as those pop songs that get stuck in your head and play over and over, driving us nuts while we try to concentrate on other things. But Dr. Ira Hyman of WWU says that puzzles can engage enough of your cognitive resources to force out the offending tunes.

Sudoku puzzles are effective (so long as they’re not too difficult) but verbal puzzles like anagrams proved the most effective, keeping enough of the brain busy with 5-letter alternatives to prevent those annoying songs from maintaining their grip on a subject’s attention.

So the next time the latest obnoxious pop hit crawls into your brainspace, grab a puzzle book and fight back.

(Naturally, as a proper puzzle scientist, I can’t wait to independently confirm their findings by locking some friends in a room with a few puzzle books and blasting Cotton Eye Joe over and over again. That’s just due diligence. *smile*)

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!