Week 8 Blog Excercise - Visual Thinking Research

 

The first puzzle that I have chosen was to count the triangles in this pentagon. We gave each other about 5 minutes to count as many triangles as we could and if we thought we counted them all within the time limit, we could stop.

I was unable to finish counting the triangles in the 5 minute time limit. My strategy for counting was to count the smallest triangles first and then move on to the larger ones. However, after a while of counting the 2-in-1 triangles, I started to lose track. So then I tried to change colors but it also didn't work. I believe I did this the "slow" way by counting each and every triangle manually instead of doing what my friend did.

My friend on the other hand, started out with the largest triangles she could find. She started to group the largest triangles together and numbered the total. Then she moved on the the next sizes and group those up into a number. She went from largest triangles to the smallest because she knew that the smallest would be easiest to count. She too, however, was unable to finish on time.

It turned out that the total was 35 triangles so we weren't too far off from the actual result.

Our second puzzle was to find a symmetrical cross in the image above. Once again, we gave each other a 5 minute time limit to solve this puzzle. Fortunately, it was completed within 5 minutes.

My approach to this was to use the center as a starting point since both squares were pointing that direction. So I had green as my first attempt and it wasn't even. Then I used red to redraw the cross but it became too small and blue was my final result. I tried to picture an invisible cross over what I was drawing to avoid confusion from the other lines.

My friend started also with the center as her beginning point however she tried to draw the cross with the orange first and it already look distorted. So figuring that it was not going to be at the bottom, she move to the top left corner and tried to start there. She used the lines to complete a cross pattern and resulted in the green line. It was still a little off so she figured it out and used the purple as her end result. I only realized not too long ago that she missed a line on the top right of the cross. She said that she also pictured the small cross at the bottom and enlarged it to avoid seeing the extra lines in order to draw the full cross.