The Jigsaw Puzzle Game

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Area: Literature/Language Arts
Grade Level: Middle School
Topics: epistemology, reasoning
Estimated Time Necessary: 60 minutes

Lesson Plan

Objectives:
To broaden perspectives, to encourage a group discussion, to invoke community thinking.
The Jigsaw puzzle game is based upon the theory of Anekantavada that believes in pursuing knowledge about a thing from as many angles as possible, and that every single angle is limited to its conditions.

Materials needed: A picture (hardcopy/softcopy depending on the mode of lecture)
Description: The selected picture should be divided equally in ratio with the number of participants and each participant should be give one part of the image. The facilitator asks the participants to guess what the whole picture depicts going just from the piece in their hand. Since each participant has been presented with just one part of the whole picture, they are most likely not to guess the whole picture correctly. The facilitator will now present the first image, place the second beside the first, the third beside the first and second, and so on until the whole picture is revealed. While adding each image, ask them to continue guessing what it might be. After the whole picture is revealed, facilitate a discussion using the Discussion Questions.

The complete picture

The partial images

EXPAND TOOL TEXTCOLLAPSE TOOL TEXT

Discussion Questions

  • Did you guess the whole image just by seeing the partial image?
  • How many images did you require to guess the whole image?
  • Why couldn’t you guess the whole image based on the partial image presented to you?
  • Is it possible to have complete knowledge of a thing, or is it always partial?
  • What can we do to broaden our knowledge?
  • Is there absolute knowledge?
This lesson plan was created for PLATO by:  Aaditya Vijay Jadhav, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Ramnarain Ruia Autonomous College, India..

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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