Causation Puzzles for AP History.

How It Plays

• The front face names a chain. Three rows are the three link positions: Cause, Mechanism, Consequence.
• Each row offers three candidate events, one from each of the puzzle's chains. The arrows spin that row to bring a different candidate forward.
• Submit checks the whole face. Correct rows turn green and lock. Wrong rows turn red and stay open.
• Any submit with a wrong row costs a strike. Three strikes and the chain breaks.
• Clear a face and the tower turns 120 degrees to the next chain, freshly scrambled. Clear all three to win.

What Students Do

The tiles carry no color coding and no labels. Nothing on a tile tells you which chain it belongs to or which position it fills. A student has to read the event, decide what kind of thing it is, and decide what it caused.

The distractors are chosen from the same decade as the answer, so surface recognition does not get you there. Two events can both be true, both be from 1854, and only one of them can be the mechanism.

The end screen shows all three chains in full, with the reasoning behind each link, whether you won or lost.

Running It in Class

• Warm-up. Project one puzzle and work it as a class. Five minutes. Have the room argue which event is the mechanism.
• Review station. Four puzzles per unit, best time saved per puzzle. Students race their own record, not each other.
• Before a DBQ. Causation is the reasoning process on the exam that students lose the most points to. Chains drills it.

No login, no accounts, nothing to install. Open the link on a SMART Board or send it to Chromebooks.