Here’s an activity that my 4th-grade students created for a MYSTERY DAY event they hosted in their homeroom classrooms at the end of each school year. I’ll spare you the details about the messy process we went through to figure this out and get right to the how-to.
Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action
MISSION: To create a 90-minute “experience” in which students work in small groups to solve a mystery using clues and a logic puzzle elimination worksheet.
STEP ONE:
Come up with an idea for a classroom or school mystery and turn it into a logic puzzle. This is much easier than you think! You just need a “mysterious happening,” which doesn’t have to be a crime, and several people suspected of being the cause. You can build your logic puzzle using dates, times, and accessibility to the scene.
For example, we used the disappearance of something from the classroom during a holiday break, either the class pet hamster (for younger students) or a set of robotic blocks (as shown below). The suspects were the ones known to have been in the school building during the holidays (the principal, the coach, the school nurse, the librarian, and the head custodian). The mystery story is presented to the entire class to begin the activity (sample stories HERE).
STEP TWO:
Create the logic puzzle worksheet and clues that will lead to the solution or you can use THIS PUZZLE. Change it to a logic grid format if you prefer. You can also replace the suspect titles to the names of your school personnel. Test the clues to be sure they provide enough information to solve the puzzle, but also make sure all clues are needed to complete the puzzle. Depending on your students’ experience with logic puzzles, this may take a little time if they are doing the writing, but the backward thinking will be an excellent exercise for them! (see “Kid-Created Logic Puzzles”).
STEP THREE:
Prepare group problem-solving tasks that can be passed out and solved by a small group of three to four students working together. This can involve a great deal of preparation or just a little depending on the problems or tasks you choose, but it adds to the fun and lengthens the time it takes for the mystery to be solved. Rather than simply handing out the clues to the logic puzzle mystery, the host(s) requires groups to “earn” each clue, one at a time, by solving four different tasks. Task envelopes are handed out to each group one at a time. When they have successfully completed a task, the group members raise their hands, and if the solution or response is correct, they are given one of the four main clues to the logic puzzle. This does add a competitive element to the activity as each group strives to be the first to solve the mystery.
Here are some tasks that require groups to work together:
- Puzzlemaker Letter Tiles – each group is given an envelope with letter tiles that, when correctly arranged, spell out a sentence. The sentence can be anything, but it’s fun to compose one with irrelevant information related to the mystery. For example “The school nurse attended a medical training in Dallas on Monday.”
- Who Am I? Solve Me Puzzles – the clues are spread out so that the group can work together to determine the correct answer. You can adjust the difficulty by choosing a different puzzle.
- Cooperative Problems – there are a number of group problems that can be incorporated into this activity. Fractured Shapes is one that would work particularly well. My students helped cut the shapes and put them into envelopes.
- Tangram Puzzles – each group is given 3 sets of tangram pieces and must work together to form three animals or shapes, similar to what is shown in this video. If your school has a die-cut machine that cuts tangram pieces, the prep for this would not be too difficult.
- Math Problems – the group is given a problem to solve such as “If you wrote out all the numbers from 1 to 100, how many eights would you write?”
- Codes / Hidden Messages / Word Puzzles – these can work if extra copies of the puzzles are provided to each group so that each member can see the puzzle and participate in solving it. (Note: One year, my students really wanted to rewrite the clues into codes and let the groups get the clues this way. It worked just fine, but we had to make sure that we had several copies for each group and “cheat sheets” explaining how to solve the ciphers).
STEP FOUR:
If your students are hosting this mystery, they should help prepare all of the group puzzle envelopes needed for the number of groups in their classrooms. Provide small and large envelopes and assistance with organizing everything. It was good for my students to see how much preparation and organization goes into this kind of classroom activity. Envelopes may need to be numbered or marked in some way to help keep track of which ones have been given to each group.
NEEDED FOR EACH GROUP– one logic elimination worksheet and one set of logic puzzle clues (sample HERE) / four large envelopes for each group with a different task to complete in each envelope (some large envelopes may have smaller envelopes inside with puzzle pieces, depending on the tasks given) / the story introduction (you can revise of the two found HERE)
STEP FIVE:
Present the mystery! The host(s) will share the the story that introduces the mystery and explain that groups need to be extremely quiet as they solve their puzzles, using hand gestures and paper and pencil to communicate as much as possible so that other groups do not hear their solutions. Members of the group should raise their hands when they believe they have a solution. Keep the story introduction on display during the mystery activity.
A problem-solving task is handed out to each group, and it may help to give each group a different task to start. As students work, the host(s) can walk around, responding to group questions (small hints) and checking solutions.
Each time a group completes a task and has a solution, they earn one of the four clues to the logic puzzle. When a group is ready to share a solution, members of the group raise their hands and the host checks the solution. If it’s correct, the group is given a clue. Together, they determine what can be crossed out or circled on their logic worksheets. They must put everything back in the envelope before getting another task.
THE FINAL CLUE is passed to the group when they have completed the puzzle. You might have them complete a statement similar to the way the solution is presented in the CLUE game:
It was great experience and fun for my students to host this mystery in their classrooms! Their homeroom teachers also loved letting my students take over! As it turned out, my students taught almost the entire day for their Mystery Day event giving presentations about enigmas, lessons in mathemagic, and much more.
You can also prepare this mystery FOR your class, and it’s fun way to incorporate several problem-solving tasks into one mystery activity with a little competition thrown in! You may want to include some “team logic,” too (see “Team Logic: Cooperative Problem Solving for 3rd and Up”) If you do try this, I hope you’ll share about it in a comment below!