Learning to spot patterns
8-bit playing card design by Artemy Lebedev, seen on subtraction.com
Seeing this lovely set of playing cards gives me the excuse to air a thought I had a while ago.
As a child I played cards lots. And the skills I didn’t realise I was learning are dead useful for seeing different ways into data, handy if you work in infographics these days: groups, sub-groups, hierarchy, sets, patterns, mental arithmetic, different ways of cutting and rearranging the same set of numbers. Same idea as here.
Add it to the curriculum immediately.
Hi, Lulu
the card game “set” is the absolute pinacle of the grouping aspect of card games http://www.setgame.com/set/
After you’ve grasped what constitues a set in the game the process of learning to recognise them quickly is quite unsettling, well for me it was anyway. I find it totally impossible to say how it’s done – no ‘rational’ systematic approach is fast enough to compete so you have to engage you pattern matching hardware. It’s weird in a cool way.