Medical teachers work tirelessly to develop innovative and effective educational tools that enhance and supplement the conventional didactic lectures. We introduced crossword puzzles prior to didactic lectures, as a supplemental learning tool to help students get primed with upcoming terms and concepts. Before traditional lectures, the crossword puzzles were administered in groups of 8 students each (n=73) on two different occasions. They were allowed to discuss and refer to books/internet to solve the puzzles. A batch of 82 students was not given crossword puzzles served as the control group. A Multiple Choice Question test (MCQ) was conducted and the scores in crossword group and control group were compared. Students’ perceptions on the crossword puzzles were assessed using a questionnaire. The average raw scores in MCQ test of the students in crossword group (n=73) and control group (n=82) were 36.43 ± 6.14 and 31.59 ± 7.18 respectively (p =0.000) and the students’ satisfaction with this learning method was >75% for most of the items of the questionnaire. Crossword puzzles constitute an interactive and fun-filled active learning with peers in a non-threatening environment. Given before teaching the topic, they primed the students with the upcoming concepts and later during traditional teaching, the same were reinforced. Solving crossword puzzles enabled students to self-assess their own understanding of concepts and also to identify their weak areas, which can be corrected later through a targeted approach. Keywords: Crossword; Active Learning; Self- directed Learning.