Puzzled over Shapes

 

Happy New Year!

 

The new beginnings are enchanting, and mysterious. And so are the puzzles. Math puzzles are fun, fascinating and at the same time, educating. Puzzles about geometric shapes particularly fit this description. Children learn shapes at every early age. They also point out the real life objects that resemble these geometric shapes. But, when we move beyond this basic knowledge, many (including myself 😉) think that geometry is a difficult and dry subject. How can we make it interesting? Well, most of you must have guessed the correct answer by now, PUZZLES. They provide an opportunity to understand various relations between shapes with visualization. Puzzles can keep kids busy for hours during the school holidays or remote-learning days 😀. Here are some puzzles involving triangles, and rectangles to make this new beginning exciting.

Find the Number of Triangles:

The initial learners of geometric shapes will find this puzzle stimulating. They have to find total number of triangles in the following figure formed using popsicles.

 

Small kids may miss the triangles of medium size and some hint might be needed as shown above. But then puzzles should be challenging. And the light in their eyes is priceless, after they find the remaining two medium size triangles on their own.

A simpler puzzle can be formed using a parallelogram, where again we have to find the total number of triangles.

Form the Square:

This puzzle is very easy to create, but can be quiet difficult and involving to solve. You require a few lego square blocks and the objective is create smaller parts (of varied shapes) that will form a square. Obviously the trick while creating this puzzle is to form the square first and then separate out the parts. You can change the difficulty level by changing the parts or total size of the square. Here is one example.

 

Shapes Formation:

And then there are puzzles where one has to rearrange the sticks for form certain shapes. In the following image, we have to remove four sticks and rearrange two, to form five squares.  

And here is the solution 😇

In the classic puzzle (and my favourite!) shown below, we have to change the direction of the fish by rearranging only three sticks.  

Happy Solving 😀😀