A Puzzling Display

This display may not look all that amazing, but it has proved to be a huge hit with our students.

A couple of years ago, whilst on holiday in France, I spotted some postcards with cartoon drawings and some simple puzzles – in French. It struck me that these would be perfect for the maths department to use on European Day of Languages.

I enlarged the postcards to A3 size and made a small vocabulary sheet for each one. The idea was to provide enough key words and phrases to allow students to work out what was being asked and solve the puzzles, without giving direct translations. The board in the photo is on the corridor, we also had copies in maths classrooms.

I though the students would like these puzzles, but I underestimated how much. The corridor display has been there since European Day of Languages last year. Why has it been there so long? Well that wasn’t planned – I’ve started to take it down four times, but each time I have been stopped by students protesting that they haven’t done all the puzzles yet!

It really is making way for something else next week (protests or no), but I’ll packing this one away carefully – I suspect it will be making a reappearance at some point in the future, unless I can track down some more puzzles like these next time I’m on holiday.