Puzzles and Perspectives

During the last minutes of our Wednesday EDUC 504: Teaching with Technology session, Jeff and Rory pitched a fresh game to us. The structure: four folks sit, in pairs, at two tables, and these pairs face away from each other. The pairs' goal is to assemble a 16-piece puzzle together. The remaining players in the room, with no limit to the number, act as "journalists," recording the activities of the puzzlers. The catch: each pair has only eight pieces, and they can't view each others' progress. They must rely on communication to determine placement of the pieces relative to each other and within the 16-space puzzle grid.

In our performance of this game, I was a journalist. Among the observations I recorded:

• Pair 1 began the game asking many questions of Pair 2; over the course of the game, this exclusive distribution of questions shifted such that Pair 2 was asking Pair 1 the questions.
• Many questions asked were questions of confirmation (e.g., "Do you...", "Did you...", "Are your...", etc.)
• Statements and questions made at the beginning of the game were primarily concerned with the content of the puzzle pieces (e.g., "We have three pieces with sky in them," "These pieces have dirt," "These pieces have a house," etc.)
• Statements and questions toward the end of the game were primarily concerned with the placement of the pieces relative to one another, and at the very end of the game, an agreed-upon placement identification system of rows and columns (think Battleship) emerged more or less organically.

1. Look at how much fun the horrors of naval warfare can be!

2. Look at how incredibly sexist this image is!

When the game was finished, Jeff asked us, "What is this game about?" The answer that came to mind was that of perspective: the perspective of each individual journalist and the perspective of each individual puzzler. I think it's important that not one person in the room had the same impression of the events that transpired while the puzzlers solved their task. Even their visual and auditory perspectives were different. The entire activity seemed to bring this to the forefront of thought, perhaps because most of the people in the room were asked to construct their own reality about what happened with the puzzlers. 

In thinking about how to modify this game for use in an English classroom, the opportunities for an effective lesson are plentiful. A teacher's lesson may require that students assemble their own narratives of the experience to illustrate the demands and versatility of narrational perspective; it'd be a meaningful experience, I think, for the class to hear in a creatively coherent form how each student has interpreted and organized the game's events. It might also be illuminating for the students at the center of attention to be charged with assembling the lines of a poem into a coherent whole (whether pre-determined or non-predetermined depends on the teacher's decision). The use of this game could also make for a dynamic, interesting class transition.