Word: tangram
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Dates: during 1987-1987
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...exhibit depicts a wide variety of puzzles. On display is a puzzle more sophisticated than the now-ubiquitous jigsaw puzzle, known as a "tangram." The tangram, though used in many disparate cultures, appears in more or less the same form throughout China, Japan and Europe...
...premise is different from the jigsaw puzzle, which has one and only one solution. The tangram usually comes with a booklet (or in ancient China, several volumes) which are filled with pictures that the solver creates with the seven pieces with which he or she is provided...
Included in the exhibition is an example of the more practical applications of the tangram. During World War I the popularity of this puzzle provided a manufacturer with a chance to help Allied prisoners escape; Red Cross care packages contained tangram puzzles in wooden boxes, many of which had a hacksaw, a compass, and a map concealed in a false wall...
Some were busily trying to remove a wiffle ball from a knotted string, others building ducks from tangram "furniture," others diligently working on all 336 combinations of the six-piece burr puzzle, and others intricately involved with the implications of the geometric money puzzle...
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