How Can I Create Missing Vowel Puzzles with Puzzle Maker Pro - Word Search?
This tutorial will show you how you can use Puzzle Maker Pro - Word Search to create Missing Vowel puzzles.
These options are available in all versions of Word Search.
Puzzle Maker Pro - Word Search offers a lot of 'hidden' options. Hidden in plain sight, that is.
There are two variations possible of this puzzle. One where the vowels are removed completely, and one where the vowels leave a blank space to fill in.
Variation 1 Step 1 - Specify which letters to remove
On the 'Advanced' tab for Word Search Puzzle Settings, you can find an option 'Remove Other'. Although originally intended to remove certain symbols in other languages, such as ', `, and - in French words and word combinations, you can also use this setting to create Missing Vowel puzzles.
In the screenshot you can see that we chose to remove A, E, I, O, U and Y. Y isn't considered a vowel in all languages, but for this example it is.
By its nature, missing vowel word search puzzles will be very compact, since all the words will be a lot shorter and easier to connect to other words.
Warning: There are quite a few words that will result in just a single letter if you remove the vowels, such as 'age', 'ago', 'aid', 'aide', 'no', 'any', or two letters , like 'all', 'ally'. Especially the single letter results will make the puzzle hard or impossible to solve, since a single 'g' or 'n' could also be randomly chosen for an empty square. Please make sure that you check your word list and the resulting puzzle to verify that it's the puzzle you want to publish.
Variation 1 Step 2 - Fill the Empty Squares
On the 'Solution' tab you can specify which letters you want to use for the empty squares, in the 'Hidden Word' section. It makes sense to remove the vowels from this list as well.
Variation 2
In this variation, empty spaces are left over where vowels should go. For this we select the "Hide Vowels" option. As with variation 1, you can choose what you consider a vowel, as this could be different depending on your language.
Now, in the image above you still see the vowels, because we are looking at the solution. However, if we turn off "Preview Solution" in the bottom right of the screen, we see that all vowels have been removed, leaving only a blank space.
