Solutions for Educators

Encyclopaedia Britannica is a major learning site for school children and young learners across the world. Britannica’s content editors create crossword and word search puzzles on topics of general interest as a part of their site. The puzzles span a wide range of topics from Shakespearean characters to important battles of the world, and from iconic car brands to types of fishes.

Click here to go to the Britannica site and play some of these fun puzzles.

Another great use of crosswords is to build vocabulary. Merriam-Webster uses the PuzzleMe platform to engage kids with crossword puzzles related to its words-of-the-week newsletter.

PuzzleMe can directly integrate with Google Classroom so that puzzles can be used as assignments in a class. Student scores can be reviewed and imported directly into Classroom.

PuzzleMe is used by several science publications including The Scientist (Canada) and New Scientist (UK). Depicted on the left are some beautiful puzzles by JAMA (Journal of the Americal Medical Association) website. You can solve them on the JAMA crosswords page.

And also check out multimedia puzzles on this blog by Prof. Kristine Krafts, and Sandra Wilbanks’s educational medical puzzles for MDedge and her own free puzzles blog Crosscheck.

Publishers like AAA and Wilderness magazine in New Zealand use PuzzleMe to run regular crossword puzzles to engage their readers.

On the left is a visual puzzle on U.S. national parks in which players identify the park based on an iconic image. It illustrates the use of a green theme in the grid instead of the traditional black. PuzzleMe can be themed with fonts, colors, masthead and imagery to match your brand or preference. Click here to play the live puzzle.

Crosswords are a great tool for language learners. With PuzzleMe, you can easily create vocabulary puzzles with multimedia in them. Shown alongside is a Spanish-English puzzle (Click here to play it.) Teachers have created a wide range of puzzles on the usage of topics like idioms and proverbs, numbers, everyday objects and grammar.

We can help customers generate such puzzles automatically, and they can be graded by level of difficulty of words. PuzzleMe’s creator provides for a way to users to provide a list of words which can be converted into a crossword puzzle format. This could be used as a basis for a personalized language learning system, where PuzzleMe creates puzzles for each user based on their past performance.

Try Merriam-Webster’s crossword puzzles based on their weekly newsletter on vocabulary for kids.