Have you ever played with a tangram puzzle? In today’s STEM Play of the Day from the Ripken Playbook, you will play with shapes to create your own tangram puzzle while exercising your geometry and spatial reasoning skills
What is a Tangram Puzzle?
A tangram is a dissection puzzle consisting of seven flat polygons, called tans, which are put together to form shapes. The objective is to replicate a pattern generally found in a puzzle book using all seven pieces without overlap.
Now it’s Your Turn to Play with Shapes!
Materials
Paper
Pen/pencil
Scissors
Coloring tools if desired
Instructions
Think of a picture you want to draw using geometric shapesÂ
These shapes can be squares, rectangles, triangles, hexagons, etc.
Example:
Draw geometric shapes to create your own tangram puzzle! Create two copies of this puzzle.
Use your scissors to cut out the shapes of one of your puzzles.
Share your puzzle with a friend to see if they can assemble it correctly while following the second copy of your puzzle!
For an added challenge, see if they can assemble your puzzle without referencing the second copy.
Questions
Look at the example of a tangram puzzle above and identify three shapes in the puzzle. What are these shapes?
What combination of shapes did you use in your tangram puzzle?Â
If you look at a picture of a baseball field, what shapes do you see? How many different shapes can you find?
What about a football field? Soccer pitch?
Share a photo of your tangram puzzle with us on social media!
