Jumbo Grand Tour Puzzles

These jumbo grand tour puzzles are designed to be solved by groups of students using either mini craft sticks or dry erase markers. This is the perfect collaborative activity for the beginning of the school year or anytime!

What is a Grand Tour Puzzle?

A Grand Tour Puzzle is a loop-building logic puzzle that requires all of the grid dots to be connected in a single, non-intersecting loop. These Grand Tour puzzles are available in a wide variety of grid sizes, and the difficulty level increases dramatically as the grid size increases.

Some of the dots have already been connected in the grid. It is up to the solver to add in the missing connections so the loop visits every dot exactly once. Each puzzle has exactly one unique solution.

SAMPLE PUZZLE

SAMPLE SOLUTION

Jumbo Version with Craft Sticks

I decided to create a jumbo version of the grand tour logic puzzles to use as a first week of school activity.

I designed a 6×9 grand tour puzzle board that could be printed on 11 x 17 cardstock.

I chose this sizing so that the puzzle can be solved using 1.6 inch craft sticks (thank you Amazon!). If you don’t want to invest in special sized craft sticks, you can just as easily slide the 11 x 17 cardstock into an 11 x 17 dry erase pocket and turn it into a dry erase activity!

The 11 x 17 paper size was perfect for 3-4 students to work on at the same time in groups. If you do not have the ability to print on 11 x 17 inch paper, I also have a letter-sized version that you can cut and glue together to form a large puzzle sheet.

It was so fun to walk around and watch my students communicating with one another as they worked to solve these puzzles. Often a group would think they had found a solution. When I pointed out that their popsicle sticks did not make a single closed loop, they would instantly start moving the sticks around and working together to try to fix the mistake.

This really did live up to my hopes and expectations of being an awesome first week of school activity. But, I would recommend it for use during the entire school year.

Levels of Difficulty

These jumbo grand tour puzzles come in four levels of difficulty: easy, medium, hard, and challenging. There are five different puzzles for each level of difficulty for a grand total of 20 grand tour puzzles.

For my own high school students, they had never seen or solved a grand tour puzzle before. So, I started them with solving a simple 3×3 and 5×5 grand tour puzzle on the Promethean board. Once they understood the concept of creating a single loop that visits each dot on the board, then I set them free to work on the jumbo puzzle in groups.

All of my students worked on an easy level grand tour puzzle, and the easy level turned out to be hard enough!