

Geometric Transformation Puzzles - jacktoole1
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/recreational-math/brain-teasers/e/transformation-puzzles

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CGamesPlay
Neat idea, but the interface as is feels super clunky. For example, the undo
button on the first question causes my reflection controls to disappear. I'm
off by half a point, but I can't quickly iterate to find the right answer. For
the second one, I imagine a click and drag interface would do pretty well,
where I click the origin and drag a distance equal to the dilation.

It's a great interactive puzzle either way. I imagine that making it more
highly interactive would be a great way to help kids get better at spatial
reasoning.

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gatehouse
I took me forever to figure out how to execute the reflection (which is to
click on the arrows that point to the dash-line after you position it by
dragging.) But it might be from being dropped in the middle instead of going
through the sequences.

~~~
blueblob
Yeah, not intuitive at all. Why do you have to click the reflection button if
reflection is the only operation you have? There seems to be no response from
the interface when you click the arrow if you have it poorly placed. It would
be much nicer if it left the reflection line there in a different color and
created a new line in a different color so you could see what happened more
clearly.

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nanofortnight
I found puzzles involving dialation to be quite annoying.

Consider this solution for the third puzzle of Transformation Puzzles 2:

    
    
      Reflection over the line from (1.5,-1.5) to (-1.5,1.5)
      Dilation of scale 256 about (2.5,2.5)
      Reflection over the line from (1.5,-1.5) to (-1.5,1.5)
      Dilation of scale 1/256 about (2.5,2.5)
    

You are unable to visibly discern a difference between the two shapes after
this, but the interface refuses.

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jacktoole1
First, I'm very sorry about that!

Second, wow, a scale factor of 256! Off the top of my head it might be
numerical error building up. If that's the case, I'm very sorry. (It's also
sometimes possible to get infinitesimally close to the target without
technically reaching it mathematically, in which case the interface
unfortunately looks like the answer is correct, when it's not.)

All of the puzzles are solvable with dilations of scales only 2 or 1/2.

~~~
hamburglar
I thought these were really great, and the UI was nice too, once I figured it
out. Some minimal instructions might be helpful for someone thrown directly
into the puzzles without having gone through whatever led up to them.

I ran into a situation where it seemed like there was no viable solution which
kept the figure under manipulation within the visible bounds at all times, so
it was made more difficult by having to visualize where it went offscreen in
order to keep track of what I had to do next. It's entirely possible that I
could refactor the operations into something that kept it onscreen the whole
time, but I couldn't find it, so I really wanted a way to zoom out or pan
around, or at least some encouragement like "this should be possible without
the shape leaving the visible area." Maybe giving the user the ability to zoom
out but also drawing a bounding box that shows the space you're expected to do
the transformation in would help.

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zindlerb
Given the solution, a fish was a great choice of shape.

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snarfy
Spend 30 minutes building something in OpenSCAD and you will be a wiz at this
game.

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frogpelt
I'm stuck on part 2 #1.

