Tarsia Puzzles

Do you use Tarsia puzzles?

Tarsia Formulator is a great bit of free software that enables you to create relatively simple jigsaws, dominoes and follow-me cards.

They come in lots of shapes including rectangle squares and non-square rectangles, rhombuses, parallelograms and regular hexagons (made up of triangular pieces).

Although designed for maths use, the software can be adapted for any topic and allows images to be imported.

There is one question for each internal edge in the puzzle (the other side of the edge is an answer). Outer edges are blank.

Playing Tarsia puzzles is a fun and hands-on way for students to review and practice. They promote discussion of concepts, reasoning and get everyone involved.

Tarsia puzzles are an effective way to encourage collaborative working. Many teachers use them as a revision resource before moving further into a topic.

Ten top tips for using Tarsia puzzles can be found here.

As Omar and Said (2019) say,

Tarsia puzzles promotes a fun, collaborative learning environment, but also challenging in helping the pupils to test their knowledge.