Tangram games and puzzles offer a fun and engaging way to introduce young children to fundamental STEM concepts through design and play. Skills like abstraction, mathematical logic, spatial reasoning, and decomposition become tangible experiences rather than abstract lessons. STEAM games like Tangram Farm add an artistic element, creating a well-rounded learning opportunity for children.
Tangram Farm: A Farmtastic Learning Adventure
Tangram Farm uses 24 charming farm-themed tangram designs to create a captivating world of problem-solving. Children tap into their creativity as they build, solve, and match tangram puzzles, all while developing essential cognitive skills.
Simplifying Tangrams for Young Minds
Traditional tangram puzzles require all 7 pieces, posing a challenge for young learners. Introducing puzzles using only 2 or 3 pieces, as showcased in the 1848 book Geometrical Puzzle for the Young, helps keep things manageable for children as young as 3.
Thomas Hill: Pioneering Tangram Education
Thomas Hill, an engineer, mathematician, and future Harvard University president, believed in making math fun and accessible. He used tangrams in one of his books to spark classroom conversations about angles, diagonals, and decomposition, encouraging a playful inquiry-based approach to learning.
Unlocking Learning through Conversation
Hill's book included guiding questions for each puzzle, fostering dialogue between teachers and students. These questions explored geometric concepts and encouraged creative problem-solving.
Tangrams: Geometric Games and Puzzles for STEM Learning
Tangram games and puzzles are a fantastic way to introduce children to important STEM skills through the use of Design as a game play element. Skills such as Abstraction, Mathematical Logic, Spatial Reasoning, and Decomposition can be “experienced” rather than taught through the active learning opportunities offered by STEAM games like Tangram Farm, which adds Art to the mix of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.
Tangram Farm uses 24 cute farm-related tangram designs to create a storytelling universe of farmtastic problem solving, disguising learning as creative play:
Tangram Farm players engage creative design talents to play this hands-on tangram game by building, solving, and matching tangram puzzles and solutions.
Keeping Tangram Puzzle Solving Simple for the Youngest Learners
Each Tangram set contain 7 pieces:
- Square
- Parallelogram
- 2 Small Right Triangles
- 1 Medium Right Triangle
- 2 Large Right Triangles
Tangram puzzles traditionally require the use of all 7 tangram pieces to create a tangram design. For instance, the Butterfly puzzle from Tangram Farm can be created with all 7 tangram pieces:
Managing the placement of 7 tangram pieces can be a challenge for young children. One approach to keeping things simple and accessible for children as young as 3 is to introduce tangrams via puzzles that only require 2 or 3 tangram pieces to solve.
Using tangrams to encourage even the youngest students to learn through play has been a popular pedagogical strategy since at least 1848, when the book Geometrical Puzzle for the Young: Puzzles to Teach Geometry was published. One of the first English textbooks to use tangrams as a learning activity, Geometrical Puzzle for the Young contains 240 puzzles that can be created with only 2 or 3 tangram pieces. Author Thomas Hill wrote the book to encourage early learners and young children to have fun while learning mathematics and problem solving.
Fun fact: Thomas Hill is often credited with being the first person to use the term “tangram” in a published work to describe this famous Chinese puzzle when he included "tangram" in his book, Geometrical Puzzle for the Young: Puzzles to Teach Geometry.
Thomas Hill, President of Harvard University and STEM Polymath
Thomas Hill wanted to make mathematics more accessible and enjoyable for young students. He invented the puzzles in Geometrical Puzzle for the Young to serve as starting points for conversation to encourage elementary school students to pursue an inquiry-based dialogue with mathematics. Hill believed that tangram puzzles could help students develop their problem-solving skills and critical thinking abilities as a “more natural introduction to science than the abstract language of arithmetic”. Hill suggested that the tangram puzzles contained within the book could be used as a “reward” for students whose “conduct deserves it”.
Thomas Hill was a STEM polymath: an inventor/engineer, technologist, mathematician, and scientist. After earning his Doctor of Divinity from the Harvard Divinity School, Thomas HIll wrote several other mathematical textbooks in addition to Geometrical Puzzle for the Young, including First Lessons in Geometry and Geometry and Faith. Hill also invented an early version of a mechanical computer. Hill received a patent for this key-driven calculating machine (his “improved arithmometer”) in 1857, the second patent awarded in the USA for a mechanical computer. He eventually went on to serve as president of both Antioch College and Harvard University.
Accessible Tangram Puzzles that Only Use 2 or 3 Tangram Pieces
While a tangram set usually consist of 7 pieces, Hill restricted readers of Geometrical Puzzle for the Young to a smaller collection of pieces. By reducing the total number of tangram pieces required to solve tangram puzzles, Hill hoped to make tangram puzzle solving accessible to even the youngest students.
Tangram Puzzles Made from Two Triangles of the Same Size
The first page of puzzles in Geometrical Puzzle for the Young, features tangram puzzles that can be solved with two triangles of equal size:
While the original tagnram set contains two pairs of equally sized triangles (2 Small Right Triangle pieces and 2 Large Right Triangle pieces), the two large triangles are probably easier for small hands to manipulate.
The Pyramid puzzle from this first page is good puzzle for young children to start learning how to solve tangram puzzles:
With a little trial and error, there is only 1 way to combine two triangles of the same size to create this Pyramid shape:
Tangram Puzzles Made from One Medium Triangle and Two Small Triangles
Once several two-piece tangram puzzles have been solved, readers move on to solving three-piece tangram puzzles. The fifth page of puzzles in Geometrical Puzzle for the Young features tangram puzzles can be solved with 2 small triangles pieces and 1 "large" triangle piece. The "large" triangle piece used in the illustrations is actually the medium triangle from the tangram set:
The Rectangle puzzle in the top-left of this page has two possible solutions for this configuration of shapes:
or 
Exposing Early Math Concepts through Conversation about Tangram Puzzles
Hill believed tangram puzzles could be a powerful starting point for conversation between teachers and students. He includes several questions as potential classroom conversation starters for each of the 204 tangram puzzles contained within the book:
Angles
- How many corners, or angles, are present in the puzzle?
- Which of the angles are square, or right angles?
- Which corners are acute?
- Which corners are obtuse?
- Which angles are concave, or indent, the puzzle?
Diagonals
- How many diagonals can be drawn, or straight lines through the puzzle, from corner to corner?
- Which diagonal will divide the puzzle in equal halves?
- Will any line divide the puzzle in equal parts? That is, is it symmetrical?
- Will more than one line divide the puzzle into equal parts? That is, is the puzzle symmetric on multiple axes?
Decomposition
- Is there more than one way of forming this puzzle, with the same triangles?
- Can you solve the same puzzle with a different collection of tangram shapes?
Modern Tangram Resources for Early Learners
Today, resources like Tangram World offer puzzles inspired by Hill's work, promoting a discovery-based learning approach. The Tangram Farm STEM coloring book provides over 90 pages of engaging activities based on the popular memory-matching game, further solidifying learning through play.
Key Takeaways:
- Tangrams are a versatile tool for introducing STEM concepts to young children.
- Simplifying puzzles to use 2-3 pieces makes them accessible to even the youngest learners.
- Conversations about tangrams encourage exploration of geometry, spatial reasoning, and problem-solving.
- Modern resources like Tangram World, the Tangram Farm game and the Tangram Farm: STEM coloring book make learning fun and engaging.
Keywords: tangram, tangram puzzles, STEM learning, early childhood education, spatial reasoning, problem-solving, creativity, Thomas Hill, Tangram Farm, Tangram World