The New York Times has been on a roll creating online games with potential education uses.

One is “Connections” – see NY TIMES UNVEILS “CONNECTIONS,” AN ONLINE GAME THAT’S GREAT FOR ELLS.

The other is “Flashback” – see NY TIMES UNVEILS GAME WHERE PLAYERS HAVE TO PUT HISTORICAL EVENTS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER.

Now, they are testing out a new game called Strands.

Strands is basically a Word Search with a few small, but intriguing, twists.  Here’s how an article from Atlantic describes those changes:

The player must guess the words to find in each scramble based on a cryptic theme, and the scrambled words, which can bend in any direction, are arranged to use up the entire letter grid.

Having a theme to a word search doesn’t seem like that big of an innovation to me, but having all the words in the grid involved in making up words (though not all are relate to the them – finding a non-related one results in you getting a hint) seems like its main unique contribution to the genre.

Unlike the first two games I mentioned in this post, Strands seems likely to be too challenging to most English Language Learners (it was certainly challenging to me!).

However, just as the Times borrowed their ideas for the Connections and Flashback from education sites and made more difficult versions, I’d bet dollars-to-donuts that soon there will be other online sites borrowing some ideas from Strands and making versions that are much more accessible, including letting teachers create their own.

I’m adding this info to THE BEST SITES FOR CREATING NOT TOTALLY USELESS WORD SEARCHES.