Site Recommendation: JigZone

I have a range of ages and abilities that visit my computer lab every day. It's always a challenge to provide the kids with engaging content due to our limited bandwidth. There is a website that I've used more and more this year and I'd like to tell you about it. Recently I've been adding JigZone as one of the approved websites that my students are allowed to visit. JigZone is a puzzle website which has large, varied categories including themed sections such as animals or sport.

Many themed puzzles keep the idea fresh.

 It's a great site because it loads relatively quickly and provides you with lots of options. The puzzles are available from 6 to 247 pieces. I use the 20 and 48 piece puzzles with my age 5 - 9 year old students. The kids become calm and focused when working on their puzzles, which is quite unusual for my computer lab! They often choose to work on puzzles in their free time and enjoy working on their own or in partners. I keep our school Symbaloo up to date with puzzles appropriate to their learning themes.

To keep things fresh, JigZone has a puzzle of the day and also a custom puzzle feature that I haven't tried out yet. Underneath the puzzle space is some statistics about how long you have taken compared to the average and the fastest time - I plan to introduce these to my students as they progress.

A screenshot of the puzzling interface on the JigZone website.

They have some ads on the puzzle page. The top ad is an unobtrusive banner but the bottom ad is a square video which autoplays and enlarges to a full-screen video advert when you mouse over it. For my young (and even older) students this is a huge temptation to play with. We constantly do talks about the purpose of advertising and remind our kids about our limited bandwidth, which means running a full-sized video ad is not the best idea. 

Despite the adverts, JigZone offers a great puzzling experience for my students.