Kids With Time And A Pencil Start Playing With Logic

By Nancy K. Crevier

They play it because it is easy; they play it for the challenge. They play it alone or in groups, they play it at work, at home, and in school. It is sudoku, the addictive logic and reasoning puzzle that has grabbed the attention of people from coast to coast this past year, including that of many youngsters in Newtown.

“A lot of kids play. I’d say the majority of the kids at the high school know about it,” says Newtown High School senior Corey Stokes. The first time Corey encountered sudoku was this past year when a friend ripped a page out of her Sudoku puzzle book and handed it to Corey to pass some free time.

“What I like about it,” she says, “is that you don’t have to know math to play; you just have to be able to count from 1 to 9. I play it when I’m just passing time.”

Corey turned her friend Katie Winkler on to the game and Katie agrees that it is a great way to wile away the minutes. “This year, earlier, I saw [Corey] working on one and thought it looked fun,” she says. “Then I had a long flight delay at the airport, and I bought a book of sudoku puzzles. I like that there are all different levels. There are real easy ones, that you can do in just a few minutes, and feel very satisfied and others that you have to work at. There is a lot of variety.”

The game is a seemingly simple one. Each cell of a 9 by 9 grid of 3 by 3 subgrids, some prefilled with various numbers between 1 and 9, must be filled with a digit, again only 1 through 9. Each row, column, and section can contain each number only once. Using logic, reason, skills — scanning, elimination, marking, or analysis — and some patience — the entire grid is completed.

The name sudoku, shortened from the Japanese “suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru,” which means, “the digits must remain single,” leads many to believe the game is of Japanese origin. In reality, its origins may be traced as far back as the 8th Century, to the Islamic Magic Squares.

The puzzle that has been popularized 13 centuries later, however, first appeared in the Dell magazine Math Puzzles and Logic Problems in 1979, and was known as Number Place. Nikoli Company, Ltd, a Japanese puzzle company, presented Dell’s Number Place to its readers in the mid-80s, shortening the unwieldy “suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru” to “sudoku,” as the game gained in popularity. By 2005, sudoku had become an international obsession, selling thousands of puzzle magazines, appearing in classrooms across the United States, being passed from friend to friend, popping up in the media, and being accessed online.

At dailysudoku.co.uk, sudoku buffs can download and print a variety of sudoku puzzles each day, including kids’, giant 12 by 12 or 16 by 16 puzzles, the popular 9 by 9 arrangement or even one set up in a step pattern. Other sites that offer an endless supply of new puzzles are monterosa.co.uk/sudoku and websudoku.com.

Sudoku is big with students at Newtown Middle School, too. Eighth grader Andrew Golankiewicz discovered the puzzle game this year in math teacher Nelson Poulter’s classroom. “Mr Poulter always has them out and I always take one,” says Andrew. “I like that each one is different and there are different way to solve the problems. Even if you can’t see it, there’s always a logical answer and you don’t have to guess.”

Andrew grabs a sudoku puzzle from websudoku.com nearly every day. “Websudoku has a lot of puzzles,” he says, “and there are four different levels.”

Using mainly the process of elimination — “marking is too messy,” he says — he finds himself able to solve even a hard puzzle in about 15 to 20 minutes. Kids who are not into math or good at it still find sudoku fun, says Andrew.

Mr Poulter admits to having an affinity for the sudoku puzzles. “My wife and daughter-in-law were into it before I was,” he says, “One of my students gave me a book of the puzzles as a gift. I enjoy doing them and I do them almost every night.”

As an instructor, he is always looking for ways to challenge his students in their down time, and sudoku fits the bill. “It is great for developing critical thinking skills,” he says.

His students Calvin Song, Brady Eggleston, Marissa Saravis, Amanda Petersen, and Nicole Vournazos are particularly enamored of sudoku. All of them do a puzzle several times a week and Brady confesses she is “pretty crazy” about them. What makes sudoku more intriguing than a regular crossword puzzle, they all say, is that there is really only one answer that fits. “A crossword sort of has two parts,” says Marissa, “so you have to match up and down and make sure it fits both ways, even if it fits in the number of squares.”

“It makes math fun because you want to solve the problem,” says Nicole, “but don’t do them in pen!”

Mr Poulter is not the only math teacher caught up in the craze. Linda Dale Mulholland had so much fun the first time she encountered a sudoku puzzle that she just had to try it with her students. “Once I started giving out the sudoku, a lot of kids got ‘addicted.’ When I didn’t have time to copy a puzzle one day during CMT testing, a number of the kids missed it.”

She has offered a bigger challenge to her classes through some of the more unusual sudoku puzzles, such as the circular version and the 16 by 16 grid that incorporates numbers and letters. “Some kids prefer one over the other,” she says. “The circular ones are a little math lesson, because of the way it is designed in a sector, or pie, shape. Looking for combinations is always a math piece.” So far, several of her students have attempted the 16 by 16 grid, but she is still waiting for one of them to come up with a correct solution.

Matt Baier is one of Ms Mulholland’s integrated math students who has found the puzzle game “fun and challenging. At points, it really makes me think,” he says. Matt’s math class was assigned a sudoku puzzle for extra credit right around Christmas break, Matt recalls. He believes that his strong aptitude for math makes the puzzle more fun for him than it is for those not so inclined toward math, but he does see a number of other students working at the puzzles. He has found sudoku interesting enough to propel him to buy a book of the puzzles while waiting in the airport over winter break. “It can get pretty boring in the airport and sudoku was a fun thing to do,” he reports.

Like Matt, Jessica Cherry likes that “you have to use your brain a lot and think of all the possibilities.”

Kara Brown, Matt Bobkowski, Patrick Schaedler, and Scott Simon, also Ms Mulholland’s students, are in agreement that using a marking strategy can be hugely beneficial. “If you get one wrong, it’s all wrong,” says Kara and Matt adds, “Getting one wrong is so aggravating.” To avoid having to toss out all that hard work, Patrick Schaedler marks small number possibilities in the empty boxes, while Scott uses the strategy of blocking out where numbers could go, then circling numbers of which he is certain he has correctly inserted. “Then you don’t have to erase anything or start over, because you know just the numbers that you might have placed wrong,” he says.

Another of Ms Mulholland’s students has taken his fascination with the puzzle game one step further than his classmates. Says the math teacher, “Ishan Tatake created his own Sudoku puzzle; and it works! Quite an accomplishment for a middle schooler!”

If the local level becomes too mundane for Newtown sudoku players, they can seek to excel on the national level. Diehard sudoku fans will be lining up this spring when Challenge Me, LLC hosts the first national face-to-face sudoku competition in the United States. Regional champions from all over the country will be chosen during playoffs that begin in early May. Participants will work to solve sudoku puzzles in the quickest time in each qualifying round. The regional champions will then compete nationally at a tournament in Las Vegas in January of 2007 to become the 2006 sudoku winner.

The prize? Only $50,000. Registration for the tournament is at www.sudokuchampions.com.