Visual Crosswords - Google Arts and Culture Interactive Experiment


I've been exploring the collection of Google Arts and Culture Experiments and sharing some of these interactive activities over the last few weeks. These interactive resources will have content connections for some of us, but I also think they can be great brain breaks for students or even teachers. There can also be some great connections to creativity and critical thinking.

Today I wanted to share Visual Crosswords. Instead of clues and letters the crossword clues are connected to works of art that are used to complete different crossword patterns. Be sure to also explore the additional Arts and Culture Experiments linked at the end of this post.

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. So we riffed on the idea of a crossword puzzle to create Visual Crosswords, which you solve with images instead of letters. Figure out where each artwork fits in the grid: Is it Renaissance or Modern? Is it Van Gogh or Gaugin—or both? Drag each one to the correct box and progress through levels of difficulty.

The idea came from the observation of the richness and diversity of the Google Arts & Culture visual assets. Why not then reinterpret the traditional textual crosswords and play with images instead of words? This is the initial direction which led the creative coder’s team, Emil Wallner and Jonathan Blanchet, to experiment with visuals and a crossword grid.

Around 100 artworks of the Google Arts & Culture collection have been used to create the first set of visual crosswords and nine difficulty levels are available.  

How would you use this with students? If you have a creative idea, I'd love to have you tag me in a tweet. @WickedEdTech

Looking for more Google Awesomeness? Here are a few recent posts connected to Google and teaching and learning.

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