Ant Farm Puzzle

This Ant Farm Puzzle from Erhan Çubukcuoglu is a fun twist on the classic edge-matching puzzle. Can you arrange these sixteen pieces to form an ant farm which is a closed loop?

I posted this ant farm puzzle on my dry erase board this past week as our puzzle of the week. Its eye-catching design made quite a few students notice it throughout the week.

Source of Puzzle

This puzzle is the creation of Erhan Çubukcuoglu, a puzzle creator from Istanbul, Turkey. Erhan has published quite a few free printable puzzles on his blog, DIY Puzzles.

This puzzle is actually named the “Formicarium Puzzle” by its author, but I didn’t think my students would know what a formicarium was. In fact, I had to google formicarium myself to make sure that it meant ant farm as I suspected.

Puzzle Instructions

Erhan Çubukcuoglu actually has created two different versions of this ant farm/formicarium puzzle. Additionally, each of these two versions are available in black and white and full-color designs.

4×4 Puzzle

Arrange the 16 pieces to make a 4 x 4 closed loop. This is the puzzle I chose to use with my own students.

5×5 Puzzle

Arrange the 25 pieces to make a 5 x 5 closed loop. My students found the 4×4 puzzle to be very challenging, so I can’t imagine solving this larger version!

Important Note

The puzzle creator even describes this as a “difficult puzzle.” I would definitely present this as a puzzle for students to play with – not as a puzzle that students are required to solve in a set amount of time!

Printing and Prepping the Puzzle

To make a large magnetic version of the puzzle for my classroom, I took the PDF file shared on the DIY Puzzles blog and enlarged it to print four squares to a letter-sized page.

I printed the black and white version on white cardstock. You could print it on colored cardstock to make it a bit more colorful.

Then, I laminated the puzzle pages and cut apart the sixteen squares.

I added ceramic disc magnets to the back of each piece so I could hang the puzzle pieces to my dry erase board. If you plan to have students solving the puzzle on the table or ground, the magnets are complete unnecessary.

I also printed a few copies of the 4×4 puzzle on different colors of letter-sized paper. I printed these at the puzzle’s original size instead of the enlarged puzzle pieces I made for my dry erase board.

For my puzzle of the week, I gave students the option to choose from solving the large magnetic puzzle on the dry erase board or taking one of the bags of colored puzzle pieces back to their table to solve.

I used one of the magnetic pockets I got from Charles Leonard on Amazon to display the small colored puzzles next to the large puzzle display. I seriously love these pockets. They are a classroom must-have!

I had a blast this week watching students tackle this ant farm puzzle.

So far, none of my students have been able to solve the puzzle. I’ll probably go ahead and leave the magnetic pocket with the small bags of puzzle pieces up next week as well in case any of my students want to take another stab at the puzzle.

One of my students did get quite close to solving the puzzle. How cool does this look?!?