Students and Sudoku Puzzles

Posted by Naomi Rockler-Gladen Dec 4, 2006

Generation Y college students are hard to pin down! So much of their identity has to do with technology-- MySpace, Facebook, iPods, cell phones, text messaging. Yet what is Generation Y addicted to more than anything else? One glimpse into a college classroom and you'll see a room full of students obsessed with a puzzle that involves a the shockingly low-tech technology of paper and pencil. I'm referring, of course, to the mindblowing phenomenon of the Sudoku puzzle!

Sudoku puzzles (here's some Sudoku examples, if you haven't seen them of these before) are logic puzzles. A puzzle consists of a 9 X 9 square grid divided into nine 3 x 3 square grids. To complete the Sudoku, every row and every 3 X 3 square grid needs to contain every digit from 1 to 9. Puzzles start with some of the numbers already in place as clues, and the puzzles are ranked in difficulty level.

How low-tech is that? Paper? Grids? You can't even do a Sudoku with a pen, because there's so much erasing involved, so even the pen becomes replaced with the lower-tech pencil and eraser. Sure, there are high-tech versions of Sudoku that are plenty popular, in the forms of online Sudoku and electronic Sudoku. But still, in the world of complex online gaming, it's striking that so much online game traffic is driven by such a simple game. There's no special effects here, just 1 through 9.

I think the Sudoku phase speaks volumes about Generation Y, and about all of us tech-driven postmodern folks. Perhaps the most accurate defining characteristic of Generation Y is that they cannot be defined. Yeah, we all want to put Generation Y into this technology box. We want to label them as technologically overdependent kids who instant message their roommates and who do all their research on the web. Instead, it's Generation Y who's putting things into boxes-- numbers, that is, from 1 through 9.