CLASSROOM
Mini golf for the classroom
PUTTLE is a free daily 3D mini-golf puzzle that fits a class: one five-hole course a day, the same for every student, played in the browser at https://puttle.golf. No download, no student accounts, no email sign-up, no chat. A round takes a few minutes and there is no timer.
Why it suits a class
- Everyone gets the same course that day, so a class can compare cards and talk through the same tricky hole. A new course opens at local midnight.
- It's short and untimed. A round is five holes, usually a few minutes, and it can be paused. Practice courses on the 🌍 World Tour are there for anyone who finishes early, and they never touch the daily streak.
- It runs in the browser: Chrome on a Chromebook, Safari on an iPad, any current laptop. It needs WebGL 2; a device without it is offered PUTTLE Classic, the simpler pixel-art original. Once the site has been opened, the game is cached and can load without a network — though the boards need one. Whether a school's network or device settings let a site through is up to the school.
One board for the class: class crews
On a weekday between 7:00 and 16:00, a player who isn't in a crew yet sees 🏫 Start a class crew on the title. Name the crew and PUTTLE shows a 6-letter code big enough for a whiteboard, with a QR code to scan. Students open puttle.golf/c/ and the code (puttle.golf/c/ABC123), or scan the square. A crew holds up to 50 players. Its board shows each day's scores, the 🏆 Weekly Open (the week's cards added up, Monday to Sunday) and the 🌞 Weekend Cup. More: crews and leaderboards.
📺 The class board (on the crew's sheet, or the title's crew sticker) is for the big screen: the code and QR to join, today's scores as they come in, the class's average on each hole with the toughest one picked out — a ready-made question for the class — and the week's table. It updates by itself every 20 seconds. Bookmark it as puttle.golf/#class=ABC123 and it opens on that screen all year.
For a few students at one computer, 👨👩👧 Play with your family in Practice is pass-and-play for two to four on one device: each putts each hole in turn and the fewest strokes wins. It never touches anyone's streak or the board.
Things to talk about
- Angles. A bank shot bounces off a rail, and the dots show the line only to the first bounce: where does it go next? The ball comes off a rail a little flatter than it went in, because the rail soaks up some of the pace into it.
- Speed. Jumps, spirals and bubble lifts each want a pace: too soft rolls back, too hot flies off. On a ramp or a hill, gravity is doing the work.
- Timing and patterns. Windmills, gates and pendulums move on the hole's clock, the same for every player, so a student can watch one cycle and predict the gap. The pendulum toy swings like a real pendulum, and the pendulum wave (on some courses) — six pendulums, each a little slower than the last — drifts into snakes and waves and lines up again every thirty seconds.
- Numbers. Scores are to par: E is even, a birdie −1, a bogey +1, so a card is a sum of negative and positive numbers. Par itself comes from a simulated player that plays each hole many times: how it's made.
- Design and testing. In the Hole Builder students drag up to 16 pieces into a hole of their own, see its par, play it and send the link. To publish it to the gallery, the game's robot first has to sink it. The daily itself is built from the date by code and robot-played under the real physics before its day comes round.
What a teacher should know
There are no accounts, no passwords, no chat and no voice. Finishing a daily posts the card to the public leaderboard under a display name — a generated alias such as Lucky Otter unless one is typed in — so tell students to keep the alias or use a nickname, never a full name. Names are up to 16 characters, and one with swearing, a slur or a crude word is refused and shows as an alias. Other players' names appear on the board and over the ghost balls that race beside you; 👻 Players' ghosts in the pause menu turns those ghosts off. The game page may show Google AdSense ads; nothing is for sale; an optional tip adds only a thank-you shelf of looks. Progress stays on the device, backed up under its anonymous id. What's stored, in full: Privacy. Keyboard play, fine aim and reduced motion: accessibility. At home: kids and families.
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