Don’t Get Stung Puzzle

Today I’m excited to share with you the Don’t Get Stung Puzzle. Most of today has been spent administering the ACT. Normally, I have lunch right after 3rd hour. Today, we tested straight through lunch.

And, I didn’t get to sit down and eat my lunch until 6th hour. Needless to say, I am worn out! How is it that watching my students take a standardized test is at least twice as tiring as teaching a full day of math?!?

Since I don’t have the energy to do actual school stuff like grading papers this evening, I guess I will share the file for this week’s puzzle on the puzzle table. Like last week’s emoji-themed puzzle, this puzzle was published in The Big, Big, Big Book of Brainteasers by The Grabarchuk Family.

If you want to invest in just one puzzle book for your classroom, this is the perfect book to start with. It is jam-packed with 567 different puzzles! Want a sneak-peek at the puzzles featured in the book? Amazon’s Look Inside Feature lets you look at quite a few of the puzzles in The Big, Big, Big Book of Brainteasers for free.

This Don’t Get Stung puzzle was a bit more complicated than the puzzles I normally type up out of my collection of puzzle books. But, once I made a hexagon template, it wasn’t too tricky to make the pieces.

This is the first puzzle I have placed on the puzzle table that allows you to overlap pieces.

In fact, this puzzle requires the overlapping of pieces. See all those bees? The final solution to this puzzle will have all of the bees hidden. Additionally, no shape can be repeated in any row in any of the three directions.

The Don’t Get Stung puzzle has got a bunch of attention from my students. Some students who never spend time at the puzzle table were asking about how the puzzle worked.

I think this puzzle has a certain visual appeal to it that sucks students into the problem-solving process.

Check out this awesome collaboration from students. There was a whole group gathered around the table on Monday in my chemistry class.