North Hills Elementary Students Engage in Puzzle-lympics

North Hills School District fifth and sixth-grade students engaged their brains in Puzzle-lympics at North Hills Junior High on Feb. 8.

The five-event, problem-solving tournament challenged students with unique, original puzzles tested and developed by West View's gifted education teacher Martin Richter. 

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The event is the only one in the area devoted to puzzles such as these in an elementary school. The events helps students to improve problem-solving skills in math, literacy, kinetic and visual perception and incorporates science and geography. It meets several state academic standards in math, science and geography.

The five tournament events are: 

• Big Toe - A super-sized version of tic-tac-toe designed for three to five players using an entire sheet of graph paper. 
• Two-Part Strangies -  Contestants find a variety of associations between random nouns by completing Venn diagrams. It challenges students’ flexibility of thinking.
• Protractor Treasure Hunt - Competitors track down a mystery object using a map with angle measure and segment length clues.   
• Cracker - A race against the clock to break large composite numbers into prime factors. 
• Krazy Kubes - Contestants assemble increasingly difficult designs using groups of blocks.

For more photos, like NHSD on Facebook. 

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