Thursday, November 1, 2012

Blog Exercise: Visual Thinking Research

The objective of this puzzle was to count how many triangles are visible within the pentagon pattern. The strategies that I employed in the solving of this puzzle were finding, pattern seeking, and visual memorization. I took started off by counting the amount of obvious triangles that are displayed in the puzzle. I then started looking for triangles along the outside of the pentagon. I soon noticed that there was a pattern with the triangles and the amount of sides on the pentagon. I noticed that the shape contained 5 triangles of each size triangle.




The strategies that my friend used to solve this puzzle were finding, and visual memorization. First he counted all of the most obvious triangles. After that, he started with finding other triangles with smaller ones first, moving up to the larger ones. As he took note of each triangle, he visually memorized which ones he had already counted. 




The first part of this puzzle required the user to figure out how many squares were visible in the puzzle. My friend used finding, pattern seeking, pattern completion, and filling in to solve this puzzle. First he found the most obvious squares, which were the ones that are verticle and horizontal. Next he noticed squares were also present using diagonal corners. He drew lines to complete the square patterns. He found 17 squares. 21 were present.
The next objective was to fill in 6 of the green dots in a way that would eliminate the ability to form any squares. He did this by filling in circles on each row or column, eliminating smaller squares first and then making sure that it also eliminated the formation of larger squares.





I used the same strategies in this puzzle as my friend. I found the squares and completed the patterns by drawing lines. I was able to find 19 squares.
For the second part of this puzzle, I accidentally filled 8 dots, which was two more than I was allowed to use to solve it. 


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