It’s a Puzzle: A Self-Organizing Activity

Helping students connect abstract concepts to concrete situations is often a challenge. Students who are unable to make the basic connections are at risk of spending the semester and beyond misunderstanding key points and their application. In this article, we provide a framework that includes debriefing, bridge building, and assimilation to help mitigate the challenge of making the abstract, concrete. We use “It’s a Puzzle,” a fast-paced group activity based on principles of experiential learning theory, to illustrate how we use this framework to help students understand and apply self-organization concepts to concrete situations. “It’s a Puzzle” provides participants with an opportunity to experience self-organization as a group, to reflect on the self-organizing interaction from the perspective of self and group, and to apply the learning experience to self-organization concepts. We have successfully used this activity as an introduction to self-organization at both the undergraduate and graduate level.