My Proposal

Name: Daniel Ruttenberg

Email: dittoman97@gmail.com

 What would you like to get from this experience? '''From this experience, I want to be able to work on something I truly care about. I’ve loved many of my classes at North, but I’d be lying if I called any of them a “passion” of mine. Through CAPS, I’ll get the opportunity to work on my passions in school for 18 weeks.

 

Name of project: Power Grids: Traditional and Modern Puzzlemaking

 

'''Why should we take a risk on you? '''Puzzlemaking has an infinite amount of potential in the modern world, but it is held back by a lack of creativity. Take, for instance, sudoku. The idea of sudoku is to create a 9x9 grid of numbers, but the manner of which it is done is tedious. Rather than force you to think and create new strategies, all sudoku does is have you use the exact same strategies over and over again. In the 21st century world, this does not stimulate thinking. Problems cannot be solved by rehashing the same strategies; rather we must think in new, original ways.

If you select my project, you won’t be getting Grandma’s Puzzles. The puzzles I have made often do not have “rules”; rather, they require you to fill in the blanks and determine what needs to be solved. The puzzles which do have rules will often combine different modes of thinking (for instance, logic puzzles which require knowledge of the pope, or crosswords with riddles for all the clues). These puzzles would be far more abstract, and as a result, they will help people truly think far better than a sudoku or a kenken would.

This project has benefits in many fields directly related to Newton North. Firstly, it allows people to strengthen themselves intellectually and if it catches on, it would allow for a far more creative sphere of puzzles in the school, and in a dream world, this puzzle would result in more abstract puzzles being given by teachers or reporters in the newtonite. Secondly, this puzzlemaking project would benefit teachers. One hope I have in this project is to create large metapuzzles (a collection of puzzles unified by a theme) for classes, such as Psychology or Calculus, and hopefully this will allow for far more interesting and far more effective review sessions at the end of the year.

Paper: The History, Neurology, and Benefits of Puzzles, Project: Write an original puzzle book.''' '''

My Background: I’ve written puzzles my whole life. It started in 7th grade, when I doodled flowers and shapes in the margins of my homework. However, progressively, my doodles became far more wordy, writing words with all 5 vowels in them (equation, sequoia, will you marry me, mind full of maybes, uncopyrightable). It then went to “games,” little games like tic-tac-toe where I tried to figure out, logically, who would win. Finally, it went to puzzles.

I’ve made several metapuzzles in my life. For Passover, every year, I make a large puzzle hunt in our afikomen hunt (last year, I made 4 interconnected puzzles out of a monopoly board). I’ve made 2 metapuzzles before just for fun (one in freshman year (4 puzzles), one this summer (12 puzzles)). I’ve also made a puzzle hunt/murder mystery for my final project in AP Chemistry. This passion is a well explored one, and CAPS would give me an opportunity to explore it in far greater detail.

Outside of class resources: Because my puzzle is so interdisciplinary, I could turn to anyone. Specifically, I would be interested in working with Mr. Hamel (he’s seen my puzzles before and likes them quite a lot and I also want to edit my chemistry murder mystery to make it worthy of an AP review), Mr. Cho (I’d love to make a Psychology Puzzle Hunt), and Ms. Ghitelman (Calculus lends itself well to a puzzle hunt).

 Scope: This is a large project, but it’s definitely doable. I have a lot of puzzles already to put in my book, and doing research on puzzle making will not slow my ability to make puzzles, but rather inspire me to make more puzzle which are far more interesting. In 18 weeks, I hope to be able to make a 100 page or so book (I already, probably, have 30-40 pages done already), and maybe even get it published.

 Commitments: I plan on doing theatre (Spon Gen, and maybe Mattress and Spelling Bee), science olympiad, and Model UN. However, I will have 6 frees 2nd semester in order to ensure I have time to work on the CAPS project.

Classes: I do not know if I will keep any classes, but right now, I’m leaning toward dropping all of them, but I probably will audit my Calculus and Physics class so I can work on the AP.

'''What's "Success"? '''My success would be 100 pages of puzzles.