Awooo!!! We're getting in the mood for a howling good time. Bats, ghoul, and the count himself! How many halloween-inspired images can you see on our game table? These images are a small sample that can be created from tangrams.
Tangrams is a type of dissection puzzle, a puzzle composed of smaller shapes like a jig-saw puzzle. It's been enjoyed for ages. The earliest known writings about tangrams is a book published in China in 1813 thereabouts, and so the puzzle must predate it. Tangrams consists of 7 polygons that must be arranged to form a target shape shown in silhouette. The polygons themselves are cut from a larger square. The rules are simple, all 7 pieces must be used, they must touch, but cannot overlap, and must lie flat. So, no thinking out of the box here and standing them on edges!!
The figure above shows the dissection of a square into the 7-piece tangram set; and a few images that can be composed from that set. Download your very own activity package for a quick experience. To play a game, the images are presented in silhoutte, or just the final outline, without of the defining [inner] edges of each piece. It takes some practice to develop the skill for discovering the arrangements of the 7-pieces to fit an image.
I can't remember exactly when I was introduced to tangrams. I recall playing it with my mother and sister. My mom had bought a couple of cheap plastic tangram packs with a few "starter" silhouettes. I remember it being frustrating fun and it was great to have my mom play along with us and teach... err... discover how to form images. There was always an element of competition against my sister as we raced to assemble a target image. But when we ran out of silhouettes, my sister and I just used the pieces as, well, building shapes. There was no internet back then to search for shapes, and our library had nothing. A particular joy of tangrams is the surprise of seeing so many familiar figures that can be created out of the limited repertoire of 7 basic pieces; but it's surprisingly difficult to discover or create imaginative figures.
When I was in college, I found a Tangoes competition set, and my interest was revived. Again, I pitted myself against my sister and it's interesting to observe introspectively how I learned to mentally dissect the silhouette into candidate pieces before arranging a figure. It was necessary because my sister is fiercely competitive, and extremely nimble. She’d use every method to beat me including out-copying my trial arrangements. I still have the competition set and two extra packs of shapes. It's in our Mathnasium center. The flanking maroon ghoul and black haunted house on the table is from that set.
There is a wealth of material devoted to using tangrams for teaching math concepts. Its relationship to geometry is evident. Playing helps build an intuitive understanding of how shapes fit (mathematicians call this tiling), and proportional relationship between shapes of differing shapes and sizes -- a tactile approach for intuiting fractions. It definitely helped me with visual and spatial agility. I've used it to explain fractions, but I’d rather play with it than force it into a teaching tool. It's gentle fun that can be played solitarily or in groups. In my opinion, it should be played with physical shapes because I think the tactile experience is important and it's difficult to duplicate on a computer screen. The real world is unforgiving and it's easy to make mistakes, but many times I've found novel arrangements from mistakes or through random pushing of pieces around.
That photo above is from a set we just bought along with a book of 330 shapes! It's still tedious and difficult to find all the shapes on the internet in one place and accessible for easy reference, so, old school it is, plus a book never powers off! The book and pieces are in our store for anyone to play with. We hope you’ll enjoy the experience and perhaps see and feel the world differently.
Contact:
Ruby Yao and Benedict Zoe, Mathnasium of Fort Lee
201-969-6284 (WOW-MATH), [email protected]
246 Main St. #A
Fort Lee, NJ 07024
Happily serving communities of Cliffside Park, Edgewater, Fort Lee, Leonia, Palisades Park, North Bergen, West New York, and Fairview.
(201) 461-6284
(201) 969-6284
