Word Search

Word Search puts a 15×15 grid on the screen with five hidden terms. Students see a pool of fifteen candidate words and have to work out which five are actually in the grid.

When a word is found, its definition appears below the grid for discussion.

What Makes It Work

A conventional word search is a spotting exercise. This one isn’t — because ten of the fifteen candidates aren’t there.

That changes the task. Students can’t just scan for a word they’ve been handed; they have to hold fifteen terms in mind and distinguish between them. Terms that look similar or sound related become the difficulty, which is exactly the confusion you want surfaced in a vocabulary session.

The definition appearing at the moment of discovery is the teaching. The find is the hook.

Setting Up

Open the Word Search hub and click New Game. Title, class, then the editor.

The Word Pool

Enter fifteen words, each with an explanation. All fifteen appear on the display; five are planted in the grid each round.

Words are stripped to letters. Spaces, hyphens, and punctuation are removed — “Right of Way” becomes RIGHTOFWAY. Keep that in mind when choosing terms.

Maximum fifteen letters, since that’s the grid width. Longer terms are rejected on import.

Minimum two letters.

Writing Explanations

The explanation appears on the display when the word is found. This is the article’s most important field — write the sentence you’d say out loud when explaining the term, not a dictionary definition.

Choosing Decoys

The ten words that aren’t planted do real work. Good decoys are terms students confuse with the real ones. Weak decoys are obviously unrelated and get eliminated instantly.

If your fifteen terms are all from the same unit, the decoys take care of themselves.

Importing a CSV

Format: Word, Explanation

Download the sample from the editor. Import replaces the pool; save afterward.

Import requires at least five usable words — below that a round can’t be built and the import fails outright.

Running a Session

Open Run for your control screen, then Open display for the projector.

Click Start round. Five words are chosen from your pool and planted in a fresh grid.

Your control screen lists the five planted words with their positions — for example starts A7 · → across. Use that to confirm a student found the right word before marking it.

When a student calls one out, click Found. The grid highlights it on the display and its explanation appears.

Undo is there for misclicks.

New Rounds

New round redraws the grid with a different five from the same pool. One setup gives you repeat plays, and the second round is genuinely different because the decoys change.

On the Display

Students see:

• The fifteen candidate words down the left, ticked off as they’re found
• The 15×15 grid, with column letters across the top and row numbers down the side
• Explanations below the grid, most recent emphasized
• A found counter

Reading Out Coordinates

The grid is labelled like a spreadsheet — columns A through O, rows 1 through 15. A student says “amortization starts at A7” instead of pointing at the projector.

Columns are letters and rows are numbers deliberately: “A seven” can’t be misheard as “seven A”.

Word Direction

Words run left to right and top to bottom only. Never diagonal, never reversed.

That’s a deliberate constraint — it keeps the grid readable when projected and lets students call out what they see without decoding.

Practical Notes

The grid never contains an accidental match. Filler letters are checked so that none of your fifteen candidates appears anywhere it wasn’t planted. A student who spots a word is always right.

Let them argue about the decoys. “Is escrow in there?” is a better discussion than finding it.

Read the explanation aloud. It’s on screen, but saying it is what makes it land.

Next Steps

• CSV Import Guide — bulk loading the pool
• The Dual-Screen Experience — control vs display