One of our friends who is a former educator gave our family a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. No one else seemed all that interested, so I decided to tackle the project. I have a quirky interest in maps and geography anyway, and I thought it might stimulate the children to get involved. Alas, working on the jigsaw puzzle simply got added to the list of “wacky things Dad gets interested in.”


You can see that this was a global puzzle. In addition to the standard jigsaw construction, there were several interesting characteristics. First of all , each country (also individual states and provinces in the United States and Canada) was its own correct geographically shaped piece. Some large countries were broken up into more than one piece. The ocean pieces were the usual random jigsaw shapes. Helping to place the ocean pieces was lettering on the pieces describing each country, its capital, population, and area, all arranged in alphabetical progression across the globe. So instead of a large area of featureless blue one could actually get some sense of where ocean pieces belonged from the lettering on the piece--but many pieces had only fragments of text.


In all, there were 600 pieces. I worked on it in spurts, whenever I needed to be still, but not thinking or talking, solving or planning, reading or figuring. Total time was about three to four weeks. I learned several interesting facts in the process. For example, did you know there was a Canadian province named “Nunavut?” Or that South Georgia Island is nowhere near the state of Georgia? Madagascar and Mauritius are both islands off the southeastern coast of Africa. Kazakhstan is a huge country formed from the former Soviet republic located south of Russia. Burkina Faso is a landlocked country between Mali and Ghana.

This was a “pseudo-cylindrical” projection of the earth’s surface in two dimensions. Some distortions are obvious, which made the puzzle a little difficult at times. Nonetheless, when I was done, I felt an embarrassing sense of accomplishment about the project. Sometimes little goals are better than big one.

Tags: Puzzles