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