How 2 Kids Made a Crossword for The New York Times

One of my responsibilities as a puzzle editor at The New York Times is to create mini crosswords that run in The New York Times for Kids, a monthly section in the Sunday paper just for — you guessed it — kids. But this month, we did something a little different: We published a full-size crossword by kids.

I came upon the puzzle earlier this year while sorting through the hundreds of submissions the Games team gets each week. Its creators, the siblings Nate Curry, 10, and Kaela Curry, 8, are the youngest people who have ever submitted a puzzle to us. Both of their parents make crossword puzzles, but Nate and Kaela made this puzzle without their help.

I was impressed. So I asked Nate and Kaela to tell me about how they constructed the puzzle. Here is some of our conversation.

(SPOILER ALERT! This article includes some answers to their puzzle.)

Solve Their Puzzle

People might not realize that when you make a crossword you write the answer words first. Then you write the clues. What is your process?

Kaela: The first step is coming up with the theme answers and revealer.

The theme is like a secret code that ties some of the clues together, right?

Kaela: Yeah. In this puzzle, all our theme entries contained words that come after “bubble.”

How did you think of that?