Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Visual Thinking Puzzles

The challenge for this puzzle was to find how many hidden triangles were within the pentagon. This first puzzle was done by my dad and he counted 20. The method he came up with 20 was by starting small with the singular triangles and progressively counting up to the larger ones. This type of visual thinking can be identified as pattern-seeking, or finding, constructing up each triangular shape.
For my version I followed the same method of starting from the smallest and finding larger shapes from there. When I did my puzzle I found there were 28 shapes, which my dad went back and found more of them. It turned out there were 35 shapes total but our methodology was in line with the solution given. I also used visual thinking through pattern seeking and finding.  
This puzzle was very challenging as it asked to navigate the person to their respective houses without crossing the path of the others. This is the one that my dad did, we were both working in pen which probably wasn't the best idea because we couldn't erase but it just made finding the answer more challenging. My dad used inductive reasoning to find out that all boxes must be used and that none of the lines can be straight. The answer to the puzzle was found using visual reasoning and spacial analogy.

This is the version of the puzzle that I completed. I mentally had to go through each of the different pathways and I would ponder, using visual reasoning, whether or not the path that I was drawing would be blocking another path. I definitely did not figure it out on the first, second, or even third try but I used deductive reasoning to figure out which alignment would allow the right passage for each of the lines.



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