A Year of Puzzles

Yesterday I saw this tweet Annie Perkins tweet and immediately loved the idea of this puzzle. The idea is to use the pieces to cover up everything except for today's month and date. I love puzzles, but this one is a special puzzle that changes every day! Annie shared this link so that admirers could buy one. I did and I hope people will buy one because, in addition to being fun, it looks beautiful. But, if I want to use this puzzle in my classroom, especially in my socially-distanced-pandemic classroom, with all my students, a digital copy makes a little more sense.

As a result, I set out to make a digital version of the puzzle. At the risk of venturing into long-winded-descriptive-recipe-blogger territory, I'll briefly describe my process. Lots of Google re-creations for me are Google Drawings, so I started there by inserting a Table. Then I used the shape tool to make a square that I used as a template to adjust the width and height of the table's cells until they were squares. I shaded in the cells of the table that I didn't need and added text and numbers to complete the puzzle frame. Then I copied and pasted my square template to build all the pieces out of identical squares. Then used "Group" to lock the squares together into the pieces. Voila! Digital puzzle. 

 

You can click here to get your own view-only version. It doesn't look nearly as lovely as the original physical version, but it will do the job. Make a copy (File menu > Make a copy) for one you can edit or share with your own students. When you click on a piece, you will get blue handles. Hover on the circular one to click and turn it. You can use the Rotate function (Arrange menu > Rotate) to rotate the pieces over if you need to flip them. I like the idea of giving each student a copy to solve daily, like a personal puzzle table. 

Final thought: It was easier for me to make the puzzle than to solve the puzzle!

Pro Tip: Restrict Access to Worksheets in Google Sheets

 

Let's say you're tracking data on students and you want to look at all the data for your students in one spreadsheet, but you'd like to share certain data on certain students with various people. Seems like it should be easy to give different people access to different tabs, right?

Several times this year I have wanted to have a spreadsheet where I accumulate data of one type or another and I share one or more worksheets (or tabs or pages) of the spreadsheet with people to view. What I have found is that while you can give people editing rights to certain worksheets, there is not a native way to restrict viewing access to one worksheet. I did find a workaround and I am sharing it here in case you also need this functionality. I admit that the workaround is not as easy as clicking the share button and making some changes, but it's not as hard as it might initially look either.

1.  Create a spreadsheet that will hold all the data that you want to share. This will be your master copy of the data that only you can access. Organize the data in a way that will make it easy to export and share.
2. Create another spreadsheet that will pull data from the master copy. This new spreadsheet is the one you will share with viewers.
3. In the spreadsheet you will share, click in cell A1 and type this formula:

            =IMPORTRANGE("spreadsheetURL","worksheetname!cellrange") 

           Replace the items in red above with information from your master copy of the data.

spreadsheet URL: Copy the web address of the spreadsheet that is your master copy of the data and paste it between the quotation marks.

worksheetname: Between the quotation mark and the exclamation point, type the name of the worksheet (or tab or page) from the master copy of the data where the data you will export can be found.

cell range: list the first and last cell from the worksheet you selected that you want to import. The first and last cell will be separated by a colon. The cell range A1:J30 will import data in cells A1 through J30.

The first time you import the data, you may have to grant permission for the spreadsheets to talk to each other, but after you grant permission, if you update your master copy of the data, the second spreadsheet will automagically update as well.