It’s now time to add a Crossword to your activity book - and the best part of it is you won’t need to come up with the words or clues yourself.

Step 1: Install Crossword AI

To create the crosswords used in this tutorial the first step will be to install the Crossword AI Canva app.

  1. Head over to https://www.canva.com/your-apps/AAGrouVHtjs/crossword-ai
  2. Click Use in existing design and select the design we created in the first step of this tutorial.
  3. You might need to disable popup blockers to get it to work.

Crossword AI is made by us at Fifteen Sparks, you can try it and the other apps in this tutorial for free but as soon as you use it in printed books you’ll need to purchase a commercial license (it’s pretty affordable, at around $14.99/year for the entire app bundle).

Step 2: Add an easy first crossword

In the Crossword AI app:

  1. Start by scrolling to the bottom and clicking “Clear all words” to remove all the starter words.
  2. Type a theme, difficulty and age group into the “Generate with AI” box … for this example we’ll use “Nature and hiking, for 8 year olds”
  3. Go to “Size and Style” and select “Print Quality”.
  4. Click “Add to design” to add the crossword, the answered crossword and the clues to your design.
  5. Lay it out, drag the answers to the final answers page (we’ll lay that out in a future chapter).

Step 3: Customising your crossword

When creating a crossword you can:

  1. Customise the words and clues,
  2. Turn solution preview on and off to get an idea of what the solved puzzle looks like,
  3. Play with how big the crossword puzzle is using the size controls,
  4. Change the colour of the puzzle and solution boxes.

For printed books its best to stick to black and white.

From here you just need to play around with the layout until you’re happy with the result and create a few more crossord puzzles based on different themes. Don’t forget, the AI built words and clues are a good start but sometimes adding a few words yourself or customising the cryptic clues will get you a better result.

In the next lesson we’ll add our first paint by numbers exercise!