For these puzzle exercises, I sat down with my mom and had her attack both. She really enjoyed the "How Many Squares" puzzle over the cat/triangle puzzle. I suppose the difference between the two puzzles is how a person is to think outside the box and visually and perceptively capture what they are looking for.
"How Many Squares" requires rotation of lines across the dots, although the dots are places upon a fixed image, turning the sheet of paper at angle helps with seeing different invisible/drawn lines.Although "How many Squares" is a simple puzzle, pattern seeking plays a huge part in this puzzle. Along with pattern seeking, pattern completion is also used, seeking the different lines in order to re-create squares else where on the puzzle. A method my mom used, was using different colors to define the different square sizes, which got really messy. I just used a red marker and was able to count in my head.
"The Cat" - of the two puzzles we used in this exercise, The Cat was less visually attentive.
The puzzle is straight forward.Count the number of triangles used to created the cat. BUT! and exception, my mom some how counted 21 triangles when there were only 20 to be found. I think she was using pattern completion and counted an extra triangle in the tail. Systematically this puzzle is easy to solve, the smallest triangles to the largest. Using "Finding" defined my McKim, a solver will be able to use pattern perception to complete this puzzle.
