Solution: Sociology of Education
Answer: YOUNG AT HEART
Written by Jonah Ostroff, Mike Sylvia
Each puzzle in the Sociology department uses parts of the profiles of two fish. This puzzle uses the instructional videos on Hammerhead’s Instaclam page, and the Education section of Starfish’s ReeledIn page.
Starfish’s Education section says that they went to Puzzle University, and lists 12 classes. Each of these is the name of a puzzle from earlier in the hunt.
Hammerhead’s Instaclam page contains 12 videos that purport to give tips on how to solve different types of puzzles. These puzzle types correspond to the 12 puzzles named on Starfish’s page. The suggestions in the videos are mostly absurd, but we can still try following the advice, and doing so always leads to an “answer”:
How to Solve a Criss-cross (Pyramid Schemes): writing BULBASAUR in each of the nine letter entries completes a two-letter entry with BR, and adding a letter before and after this yields the answer ABRA.
How to Solve a Crossword (Mr. Tambourine Man): filling 13-down, 1-across, 7-down, and 10-across as instructed with MRTAMB, MRTAMBOURI, MRTAMBOURINEM, and MRTAMBO causes the answer AREA to appear at the top.
How to Solve a Kenken (Lie Groups): Entering the numbers and operations into a calculator as instructed yields 4384917400, and indexing the digits into the title gives GEPGSLUG??. Ignoring some digits from the beginning and end yields the answer SLUG.
How to Solve a Logic Mashup Puzzle (The Telescope): The middle column contains the 1st, 9th, 18th, and 25th white circle, so the answer is AIRY.
How to Solve a Programming Puzzle (Macroeconomics): Entering a query into nutrimatic.org, to find an answer that can be spelled with one letter from each row, results in the suggestion MONK MCFAY, who is indeed some jazz drummer you probably haven’t heard of.
How to Solve a Puzzle with A Long List of Instructions (How the Other Half Lives): Indexing 53, 54, 55, and 56 into instructions 53, 54, 55, and 56 spells PINT, which does appear earlier in the puzzle (in instruction #1).
How to Solve a Puzzle with A Long String of Gibberish (Alternative Orthographonology): The long string contains the word FISHY.
How to Solve a Puzzle with Cryptic Clues (To Serve Man): The “easiest” clue (according to the video’s definition) is “Drag appearing in uptown (3)”, and reading the letters as instructed spells WING.
How to Solve a Puzzle with Many Grids of Letters (Themes and Counterthemes): The most common letters in the five grids are I, L, T, E and R (tied), and E, which anagram to spell RETILE, a word related to square grids.
How to Solve a Set of Mini Metapuzzles (The Olympics): Reordering the metas as instructed gives Skeleton (Yellow), Steeplechase (Red), Boxing (Black), Biathlon (Blue), and Weightlifting (Green). Indexing the color lengths into these names spells TENTH.
How to Solve a Word Search (Choreography): The letters diagonally adjacent to the X spell TUNE (starting from the bottom right), which is thematic to the music round.
How to Solve a Wordle Puzzle (Practical Applications of Green’s Theorem): The sixth grid’s yellow squares can be converted into binary as described to spell 21237, the zip code for ROSEDALE.
The videos on the Hammerhead page are presented in alphabetical order by title, and the Starfish page gives the final ordering. Index the grades into the videos:
| Course | Grade | Answer | Indexed |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Telescope | 4.0 | AIRY | Y |
| Macroeconomics | 2.0 | MONK MCFAY | O |
| Lie Groups | 3.0 | SLUG | U |
| How the Other Half Lives | 3.0 | PINT | N |
| To Serve Man | 4.0 | WING | G |
| Pyramid Schemes | 4.0 | ABRA | A |
| Themes and Counterthemes | 3.0 | RETILE | T |
| Alternative Orthographonology | 4.0 | FISHY | H |
| Choreography | 4.0 | TUNE | E |
| Mr. Tambourine Man | 4.0 | AREA | A |
| Practical Applications of Green’s Theorem | 1.0 | ROSEDALE | R |
| The Olympics | 4.0 | TENTH | T |
This spells the answer, YOUNG AT HEART.
Author’s Notes
Jonah: Once we decided Sociology would be the last round to unlock, I wanted to have something in Starfish’s Education section that involved revisiting earlier puzzles. The answer YOUNG AT HEART made me specifically want to use puzzles by Dana, Kenny, and Derek Young, but it ended up working better to choose puzzles that were early placed early in a variety of departments, since we didn’t necessarily know that puzzles late in a department would be unlocked by the time a team got here.
Originally we were going to reuse the actual puzzle mechanics, but that felt somewhat similar to the Classics meta, and making up nonsense extractions felt funnier. Huge thanks to Mike for the hilarious videos that accompany the instructions.
These extractions were all written after the puzzles were finalized, although I cheated a little in How the Other Half Lives by adding the word “Finally” to the last step. My personal favorite is The Telescope, which felt like a miracle when I stumbled upon it.
Mike:
