Aesthetic and mathematical form system, geometrical skills development game based on scale-shifting symmetry
The Game Family, in using and developing the basic geometric shapes of János Szász Saxon’s poly-dimensional plain painting, communicates a new artistic perspective to both nursery and primary school children as well as adults.
Having a direct, by-touch connection with the geometric shapes, the sense of vision and touch is developing and through the recognition of correlations and finding the linkage points, the ability of thinking improves and the skill of abstraction evolves. The learning process is the following:
- Sight
- Touch
- Detection
- Perception
- Memory
Attention- Concentration
- The discovery of part-whole
- Imagination
- Creativeness
- Problem-solving
These colorful and easy-to-handle geometric shapes generate infinite logical complexity and complicated mathematical and morphological puzzles. However, the game?s strength is its simplicity – it provides an equal opportunity for children of different ages, at different levels of mental and emotional maturity to develop their personality.
Progressive use of color and shape groups and the high degree of manual activity and reflective thought create a constant challenge for the children and maintain their desire for exploration, at the same time allowing an undisturbed and continuous feeling of success. Direct physical activity, the emotions conveyed by colors, and the possibility of trying out plenty of variations without being checked make the children feel free and relaxed. Such experiences help the children to find more creative and imaginative solutions when dealing with problems from different areas of life or to acquire new knowledge. Thinking operations development is as follows:
- Analysis
- Synthesis
- Abstraction
- Comparison
- Perception of correlations
- Generalization
- Clarifying
- Analogy
- Order
All in all, “Poly-Universe” should not be limited to school-lessons, to after-school problem-solving courses, to any controlled activity (while being suitable for all these), but can act as a catalyst for the new pedagogical practice of learning by playing: teaching to see.
The game family did not set up any rules for the game. During the workshop the children and adults will not solve given mathematical problems, but they will recognize the mathematical and aesthetic correlations hidden in the system individually. These correlations could be summarized as follows:
- Discovering geometric shapes
- Searching for proportions
- Examining symmetry
- Finding the linkage points
- Setting the directions
- Making colors collide
- Mixing forms
- Expanding the limits of composition
- Possibilities of combination
- Feeling the infinite
So, this game family does not only aim at problem-solving or recognizing colors or shapes, or solving logical puzzles, but also offers the possibility of playing a game freely, so children or adults can learn indirectly, through a game, an activity. When dealing with the different-scale basic geometric shapes and primary colors, they gain experience, discover and see correlations, points of linkage and shape connections and the sharp borderlines between colors, not knowing that they are learning. They can explore “Poly-Universe”, the realms of mathematics, art and philosophy, wandering engrossed in them, without being aware where they are.
This novel game family does not only develop skills or offer a visual-aesthetic experience, but it also expands the scientific knowledge, since it is based on an extraordinary mathematical set of proportions – scale-shifting symmetry.
Children and adults of different age groups, culture and social background can take part in the workshop. Both disabled and healthy children and adults can enjoy it during the workshop. Benefits of the game:
- Developing logical, pedagogical, mathematical and creative skills
- Personal Growth Impact Indirect learning method
- A new vision of art forms through the geometric poly-dimensional plain painting Arousing the desire for exploration
- Continuous sense of achievement
- Team work opportunities, developing cooperation and the need for team spirit
- Infinite number of combinations
- Cognitive development basing children’s learning processes
All ages!
Having tested the game family “Poly-Universe”, the survey results show that an approximately equal proportion of children and adults marked the importance of artistic- aesthetic and mathematical-logical characteristics of the game.
In addition, 20% of children chose dexterity and 10% of them chose company, since during the learning process accurate fitting and team work were important for them. Both age groups would definitely 100% like to have such a game in their environment – home, kindergarten, school.
Choosing between the different shapes was almost equally apportioned between children and adults. However, the circle was the most popular shape, followed by the triangle and the square. As for the number of times, children would like to play with the game, 50% marked “several times a week or daily”, while 70% of adults would play with it several times a week.
Concerning the length of time, 50% of children would spend one hour and an equally 50% several hours playing with the game, whereas nearly 100% of adults would devote one hour per occasion to the game.
Selecting from color – shape – variation, a two-third majority of both adults and children picked the possibilities of variations, while the remaining one third chose color and shape in roughly equal proportions. Free game according to their own ideas is popular with 80% of both age groups, but 20-30% of them would need rules, logic and solving mathematical problems.
You buy and create something unique
The colorful and playful visual structures and strings of pictures outlining along the linkage points between the basic elements of different shifts have an endless variety. They have an almost infinite number of combinations. If we consider that, it can be mathematically proved that it is impossible to make two identical sets when packaging the game.
So everybody in the world can have several millions of unique products!
Zsuzsa Dárdai art critic and pedagogue