Tangram as a useful tool in Geometry

 ORIGIN

Tangram (Chi Chiao) is a popular game also known as the Seven boards of skill formed by 7 polygons, called tans (there are 5 right triangles, 1 square and 1 parallelogram). It was created in China in the late 18th century and it consists on recreating some figures only using the polygons given by changing its possition but never overlapping them. Some time after its creation, it was carried over to America and Europe as a foreign game and it became really popular during World War I. Nowadays this game is known all over the world where children and adults play it as a board game.

TANGRAM AS A TOOL

Tangram is consider a really useful tool that can be used during out Math lessons during Primary and even Secondary Education. It does not only introduce some terms as Plane or Flat Geometry, but it also allow us to develop some skills with our students like psychomotor and intellectual abilities while playing with the Tangram pieces. This is why we can say that this is a versatile and stimulating activity to do.

With the seven pieces of this game, called tans we can build up to 1600 figures that are easily recognizable by everyone that represent animals, plants, symbols and even people doing different activities just by moving the pieces of this puzzle while developing visual skills and intelligences like spatial and visual skills.

EXAMPLE

One of the activities that we can do in class is a Competition in groups in which everyone has to came up with the figure choseen in the shortest possible time, we can repeat this process several times in order to let the groups win some points and foster competitiveness between classmates which also raises participation and interest in the activity.

Those figures have different levels of difficulty so depending on the course that we want to introduce this exercises, we can select the complexity. We can use easy ones in the First cycle, medium ones in the Second cycle and the difficult ones can be part of the activities done in the Third cycle of Primary Eduaction. 

This way, everyone can play Tangram no matter the course they are in or their level which makes this game a fantastic tool to use in School.