Puzzle pieces

A reward you can see from the back of the room

A jar of marbles works because it is visible. So does a chart of stars, and so does a thermometer drawn on sugar paper. What none of them has is a shape at the end: the reward is the number, and the number is the same number it would have been on a list. A picture is different. It arrives in patches, it becomes recognisable somewhere around half, and the last few pieces are the ones everybody is waiting for.

That recognisable-at-half moment is the reason to award pieces at random rather than in order. A board filling left to right tells you exactly how far along you are and nothing else; a board filling in patches makes people guess what it is going to be. Both buttons are there, because a board at the front of a classroom sometimes wants to be read as plain progress instead.

One goal for a whole class

The shared board is the version worth trying first. One picture, one room, and a piece for whatever you want more of: a quiet transition, a whole table tidied, everybody remembering their reading book. Nobody competes and nobody can be behind, which is the difference between a class goal and a leaderboard, and it matters most for the children a leaderboard never helps.

A board each turns the same thing into a race, which suits a game night or a group project with a finish line. Twenty-five pieces is a term; nine is an afternoon. Choose the size before the first piece rather than after, because a board that shrinks can only show the pieces that still fit on it.

Drawn here, not downloaded

The six pictures are built out of plain shapes in the page itself, which is why there is no image file to load, no upload and no way to add your own. That is a real limitation and a deliberate one: handling a picture would mean handling a file, and this site does not handle files. Everything you see is drawn in the browser you are reading this in.

For progress as a number or a path rather than a picture, the progress track is the page, and for a reward that is a thing to hold rather than a thing to look at, the score tokens stack up instead. Names come from the same shared list every tool here with players uses, and they never leave this browser.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.puzzle.state and pph.puzzle.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.

Player names are kept under pph.players so every tool with players reads the same list. They stay in this browser and never reach a link.