Working together seems like a great idea for something like this, where you have to do similar little tasks over and over again and one person's bright idea can make everyone else's job easier.
You've probably heard of Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection. It auto-generates these puzzles (under the title "Unequal", and among a variety of other puzzles) in varying difficulties. It might be worth looking into how it works + how it judges difficulty, in case any of that is doable by humans.
I'm not sure that the puzzle you posted is solvable. I can figure out where the 3's and 4's go, but I can't find a way to differentiate between spots that should be 1 and spots that should be 2. Might need a single additional inequality sign between a pair of 1 and 2 somewhere.
Maybe trying to make smaller puzzles of a similar flavor would be less frustrating but still check the desired emotional checkboxes? Like starting with a 3x3 with the numbers 1 to 3. Or maybe a 1-dimensional puzzle, where all the boxes are in a row. Or maybe making a good one of those row ones means that sometime some boxes are better if the jut up or down out of the row, Scrabble-style. It seems like having the desired final product of a "real" 5x5 puzzle may have been both too narrow and too steep for this group of students.
Working together seems like a great idea for something like this, where you have to do similar little tasks over and over again and one person's bright idea can make everyone else's job easier.
You've probably heard of Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection. It auto-generates these puzzles (under the title "Unequal", and among a variety of other puzzles) in varying difficulties. It might be worth looking into how it works + how it judges difficulty, in case any of that is doable by humans.
I'm not sure that the puzzle you posted is solvable. I can figure out where the 3's and 4's go, but I can't find a way to differentiate between spots that should be 1 and spots that should be 2. Might need a single additional inequality sign between a pair of 1 and 2 somewhere.
Nice post!!!
Maybe trying to make smaller puzzles of a similar flavor would be less frustrating but still check the desired emotional checkboxes? Like starting with a 3x3 with the numbers 1 to 3. Or maybe a 1-dimensional puzzle, where all the boxes are in a row. Or maybe making a good one of those row ones means that sometime some boxes are better if the jut up or down out of the row, Scrabble-style. It seems like having the desired final product of a "real" 5x5 puzzle may have been both too narrow and too steep for this group of students.