I pride myself either having teaching resources in hand or knowing where to get information. However, The Discovery website just up and changed their format and has discontinued their 'hidden message' puzzle maker and now for the life of me, I can't find another puzzle builder like it. Anyone know any dark secret places of the internet where I can find a program like this one?

If you don't know what I'm talking about, the program allows you to enter in words and a secret message. Once all the words in the puzzle are found, it creates the secret message.

Anyone?

It seems like your talkin about a crossword game! am lost here and am interested to know what you mean. I'd like to try such a puzzle.

The 'official' name for the type of game I was looking for was "word search with hidden message". I've scoured the internet but it seems like the Discovery website was the only one to have such a puzzle builder. However, they have taken it down within the last couple days.

I used it as a fun review game with my students. I would have questions they would have to answer. The answers were in the word search. Once they found all the answers in the word search, they would use all the UNUSED letters from the word search to formulate the secret message. To retain motivation, I regularly created a message about a student in the class I was teaching in.

It was a pretty cool puzzle builder and I could jury rig other puzzle builders to accomplish the same result, but this program made building the puzzle extremely easy.

That stinks. Both that they didn't keep that builder AND that they changed everything to FLASH (I'm not one to talk though.) The previous version was very user friendly and gave you a lot of options.

Looks like it's back to the old fashion way of doing things...

They did add some cool features where you can now get automatic word lists, That doesn't really help ESL teachers, but it will be more useful to students who use the site.

I was just so excited that I couldn't wait to tell peeps!!!!

I sent an email to the Discovery website about why they did away with certain puzzle makers and this is the reply I received:

"Thank you for your e-mail. We made some upgrades to Puzzlemaker recently -- and since then have been overwhelmed with emails from concerned educators such as yourself who are desperate to have the old puzzlemaker back. (We now know how Coca Cola felt in the '80s)

We absolutely did not intend to cause any disruption or distress for our educators -- many of us are former teachers ourselves and know what it means to find a great tool that you love. Therefore, we are in the process of switching back to the old puzzlemaker. We regret that these upgrades caused such a strong reaction, but are very happy to see that educators care enough to let us know:)

Our goal is to have everything restored to the old version by next week."


YAY!!! I love lovers of true education!!!!