Knowra Tangram Tangram A dissection puzzle made from seven geometric pieces: five triangles, a square, and a parallelogram. The pieces can be rearranged to form silhouettes and other figures without overlapping.
Tangram pieces : The seven shapes in a standard tangram: two large triangles, one medium triangle, two small triangles, a square, and a parallelogram. Their fixed shapes and areas constrain every figure made with the puzzle.
China : A country in East Asia with a long, continuous history of states, cultures, and intellectual traditions. The puzzle emerged in China before becoming popular in Europe and elsewhere.
Spatial reasoning : The ability to perceive, transform, and reason about spatial relationships among objects. Manipulating tangram pieces exercises mental rotation and composition of shapes.
Jigsaw puzzle : A puzzle formed from interlocking pieces that reconstruct a picture or image. Tangram pieces are simple polygons, and solutions depend on their geometry rather than picture fragments.
Dissection puzzle : A puzzle in which a shape is cut into pieces that can be rearranged to form other shapes. Tangram belongs to this broader family of geometric rearrangement puzzles.
Tangram legends : Stories that attribute the tangram's invention to figures such as a servant, a scholar, or a broken tile. These popular accounts contrast with the limited evidence for the puzzle's early history.
Geometry education : The teaching and learning of geometric concepts, reasoning, and representations. Tangram tasks let learners explore congruence, area, and geometric composition with movable pieces.
Pentomino : A plane figure made by joining five equal squares edge to edge. Pentomino puzzles use repeated square units, unlike tangram's varied triangles and quadrilaterals.
Congruence (geometry) : A relation between geometric figures that have the same shape and size. Each tangram piece retains its dimensions when translated, rotated, or reflected.
John Spilsbury : An English mapmaker who produced and sold an early jigsaw puzzle around 1760. His map puzzles offer a European puzzle-making parallel, not an origin for tangram.
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